How to Generate PDF Files in Laravel That Support RTL Languages.

The easiest way to generate a PDF file in Laravel that can support Arabic and other RTL languages.

I had so many problems achieving that until I found niklasravnsborg/laravel-pdf package. I could solve so many problems but I needed to have a font that supports the Arabic language otherwise it becomes like this [][][][]. Thanks to Google Fonts with its variety of free fonts. That’s all I needed and I had an awesome pdf file.

Useful Tutorials:

Laravel PDF

Let’s install the niklasravnsborg/laravel-pdf via composer, I’m using Laravel 10.

composer require niklasravnsborg/laravel-pdf

We can add the Service Provider and the Facade to config/app.php

'providers' => [
	// ...
	niklasravnsborg\LaravelPdf\PdfServiceProvider::class
]

//

'aliases' => [
	// ...
	'PDF' => niklasravnsborg\LaravelPdf\Facades\Pdf::class
]

Let’s publish the package’s config file

 php artisan vendor:publish

Select the provider number from the list.

  Provider: niklasravnsborg\LaravelPdf\PdfServiceProvider .................. 9

Laravel PDF Generator

Let’s create our controller and name it PDFController. We will add one function to generate a pdf file with words translated from English to Arabic.

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use PDF;
use Storage;
class PDFController extends Controller
{
    public function  generate_pdf() {

        $data = [
            'translation'=>[
                'hello' => 'اهلا',
                'welcome' => 'مرحبا',
                'good' => 'جيد'
                ]
        ];
        // Get the current date and time.
        $dateTime = now();

        // Generate a unique filename.
        $fileName = $dateTime->format('YmdHis') . '_translation.pdf';

        //Generate the pdf file
        $pdf = PDF::loadView('pdf.translation', $data);


        //return $pdf->stream( $filename);

         //Save the pdf file in the public storage
        $pdf->save( storage_path('app/public/'.$fileName));
       

       //Get the file url
        $urlToDownload =  Storage::disk('public')->url($fileName);


        return response()->json([
            'success' => true,
            'url' => $urlToDownload,
        ]);
    }
}

$data is the data that will be sent to the view. We will create a unique name for the file using the date and time $dateTime.

You can stream the file for testing while developing it $pdf->stream( $filename); but now we are going to save the file in the public storage and we will send the download link to the front-end via RESTful API.

Below is the PDF view for that file resources\views\pdf\translation.blade.php It’s just an HTML with Laravel blade templates. we can design it as want.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge">
    <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
    <link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
    <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Cairo&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
    <title>Document</title>
</head>
<body style="font-family: 'Cairo', sans-serif;">
    @foreach ($translation as $key=> $value)
    <p>{{$key}} : {{$value}}</p>
    @endforeach
</body>
</html>

I use Cairo font from Google to display Arabic characters otherwise it will be like boxes [][][][]. so that was a good solution for me.

Here is the route to test the function.

use App\Http\Controllers\PDFController;

Route::get('/generate_pdf', [PDFController::class, 'generate_pdf']);

That’s all for now, I hope that was useful for you, thanks.

How to Generate PDF Files in Laravel That Support RTL Languages.

Laravel PDF

Laravel PDF Generator

Ahmed Shaltout