Papercut

Paperwork without the sting.

Layout you already know

Rows, columns, gaps and grow factors. If you've used flexbox, you can lay out a page.

Pagination built in

Long tables repeat their header and never split a row. Headings stay with the paragraph after them. "Page 3 of 12" is one tag.

Blade or PHP

Write documents as Blade views, or build them with a fluent PHP API. Both produce exactly the same thing.

Components included

Cards, callouts, form fields, checkboxes and badges, all styled from one theme so your documents match.

PDF and HTML

Render the same document as a PDF to download, or as HTML to show in the browser.

No headless browser

Pure PHP from start to finish. There's no Chrome or wkhtmltopdf to install on your servers.

Papercut builds PDFs from Blade or plain PHP, with page breaks that just work. Here's a transcript as a Blade view:

<x-doc::document title="Transcript">
  <x-doc::page size="a4" margin="20mm">
    <x-doc::h1>{{ $student }}</x-doc::h1>
    <x-doc::table columns="3fr 25mm 20mm">
      <x-doc::thead>
        <x-doc::th>Course</x-doc::th><x-doc::th>Credits</x-doc::th><x-doc::th>Grade</x-doc::th>
      </x-doc::thead>
      @foreach ($courses as $c)
        <x-doc::tr>
          <x-doc::td>{{ $c->title }}</x-doc::td>
          <x-doc::td>{{ $c->credits }}</x-doc::td>
          <x-doc::td align="right">{{ $c->grade }}</x-doc::td>
        </x-doc::tr>
      @endforeach
    </x-doc::table>
    <x-slot:footer>
      <x-doc::page-number format="Page {page} of {total}" align="center" />
    </x-slot:footer>
  </x-doc::page>
</x-doc::document>

And a route that sends it to the browser:

return Papercut::view('pdf.transcript', compact('student', 'courses'))->pdf()->download('transcript.pdf');

If the course list runs to ten pages, the header row repeats at the top of each one and no row gets cut in half at a page break.

Built on php-pdf and php-docx

Papercut decides where everything goes on the page. Writing the file is the work of two libraries by Denis Skripchenko: php-pdf writes every PDF, with its fonts, images, SVG, QR codes and encryption, and php-docx writes the Word files. Both are pure PHP and MIT licensed, and Papercut wouldn't exist without them.