TCPDF

Legacy PDF engine for PHP. Deprecated and maintained for existing integrations.

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Deprecation Notice

TCPDF is deprecated and in maintenance-only mode.

Active feature development has moved to tc-lib-pdf, the modern and modular successor.

For new projects, use tecnickcom/tc-lib-pdf. This repository remains available for legacy systems and critical compatibility fixes.

Migration Path

• New projects: install tecnickcom/tc-lib-pdf.
• Existing TCPDF users: keep TCPDF for current production workloads and migrate in phases.
• Teams seeking modern architecture, Composer-first design, and stronger type-safety should prioritize tc-lib-pdf.

Why Migrate to tc-lib-pdf

• Modern architecture: modular libraries and cleaner component boundaries improve maintainability.
• Better extensibility: new features are easier to add without patching a monolithic legacy core.
• Stronger tooling fit: modern package structure works better with static analysis, CI, and automated tests.
• Lower long-term risk: reduces technical debt tied to legacy APIs and supports ongoing PHP ecosystem evolution.
• Improved delivery speed: teams can implement and ship new PDF capabilities with less friction.

Migration still requires planning and regression checks to preserve rendering parity for existing documents.

Future Compatibility Possibility

As a long-term possibility, TCPDF could be refactored to use tc-lib-pdf internally as a backend while preserving a practical level of backward compatibility for existing TCPDF integrations.

This is not part of a committed roadmap and there is no guarantee it will happen. It is documented here only as a potential direction that may be evaluated in the future.

Overview

TCPDF is a pure-PHP library for generating PDF documents and barcodes directly in application code.

It has been widely used across many PHP stacks and still provides a complete feature set for text rendering, page composition, graphics, signatures, forms, and standards-oriented output.

Features

Text & Fonts

• UTF-8 Unicode and right-to-left (RTL) language support
• TrueTypeUnicode, OpenTypeUnicode v1, TrueType, OpenType v1, Type1, and CID-0 fonts
• Font subsetting
• Text hyphenation, stretching, spacing, and rendering modes (fill/stroke/clipping)
• Automatic line breaks, page breaks, and justification

Layout & Content

• Standard and custom page formats, margins, and measurement units
• XHTML + CSS rendering, JavaScript, and forms
• Automatic headers and footers
• Multi-column mode and no-write page regions
• Bookmarks, named destinations, and table of contents
• Automatic page numbering, page groups, move/delete pages, and undo transactions

Images, Graphics & Color

• Native JPEG, PNG, and SVG support
• Geometric drawing primitives and transformations
• Support for GD image formats (GD, GD2, GD2PART, GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, XBM, XPM)
• Additional formats via ImageMagick (when available)
• JPEG/PNG ICC profiles, grayscale/RGB/CMYK/spot colors, and transparencies

Security, Standards & Advanced Output

• Encryption up to 256-bit and digital signature certifications
• PDF annotations (links, text, and file attachments)
• 1D and 2D barcode support (including CODE 128, EAN/UPC, Datamatrix, QR Code, PDF417)
• XObject templates and layers with object visibility controls
• PDF/A-1b support

Requirements

• PHP 7.1 or later
• ext-curl

Optional extensions for richer output in some workflows: gd, zlib, imagick.

Third-Party Fonts

This library may include third-party font files released under different licenses.

PHP metadata files under fonts are covered by the TCPDF license (GNU LGPL v3). They contain font metadata and can also be generated using TCPDF font utilities.

Original binary TTF files are renamed for compatibility and compressed with PHP gzcompress (the .z format).

For full details, see the bundled notices in the corresponding subdirectories under fonts.

ICC Profile

TCPDF includes sRGB.icc from the Debian icc-profiles-free package.

Contact

Nicola Asuni info@tecnick.com