Introduction
Converting PDF to HTML allows for better document accessibility, searchability, and responsive display on websites. This is useful for:
✅ Displaying PDFs as interactive HTML without requiring downloads
✅ Extracting text, images, and formatting for web-based processing
✅ Enhancing SEO by making PDFs readable by search engines
In this guide, we'll cover:
✅ Extracting text from PDFs and converting it to HTML
✅ Extracting and embedding images from PDFs into HTML
✅ Handling both text-based and scanned PDFs
✅ Generating searchable web pages from PDF documents
By the end, you'll have a fully automated PDF-to-HTML conversion system in PHP. 🚀
1. Installing Required Libraries (PDFParser, FPDI, and Imagick)
To extract content from PDFs, we use:
✔ PDFParser (Smalot) – Extracts text from PDFs
✔ FPDI – Reads and processes PDF pages
✔ Imagick – Extracts images from PDFs
Install via Composer (Recommended)
composer require smalot/pdfparser
composer require setasign/fpdi
composer require imagick/imagick
Include Libraries in Your PHP Script
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Smalot\PdfParser\Parser;
use setasign\Fpdi\Fpdi;
use Imagick;
✅ Now, your system is ready to convert PDFs into HTML.
2. Extracting Text from a PDF and Converting to HTML
If a PDF contains searchable text, we can extract and display it as HTML.
Example: Convert PDF Text to HTML
$parser = new Parser();
$pdf = $parser->parseFile('document.pdf');
$text = nl2br($pdf->getText()); // Preserve line breaks
$html = "<html><body><h1>Extracted PDF Content</h1><p>$text</p></body></html>";
file_put_contents('converted.html', $html);
echo "PDF converted to HTML successfully!";
Explanation:
✅ Extracts text from a PDF and converts it to HTML format
✅ Uses nl2br() to preserve original line breaks
✅ Saves the HTML output as converted.html
🔹 Works best with text-based PDFs (not scanned ones).
3. Extracting Images from a PDF and Embedding in HTML
Many PDFs include logos, charts, and illustrations that need to be preserved in the HTML version.
Example: Extract Images from PDF and Embed in HTML
$imagick = new Imagick();
$imagick->setResolution(300, 300);
$imagick->readImage('document.pdf');
$html = "<html><body><h1>Extracted PDF Images</h1>";
foreach ($imagick as $index => $img) {
$imageFile = "image_$index.jpg";
$img->setImageFormat('jpeg');
$img->writeImage($imageFile);
$html .= "<img src='$imageFile' alt='PDF Image'><br>";
}
$html .= "</body></html>";
file_put_contents('pdf_images.html', $html);
echo "Images extracted and embedded in HTML!";
Explanation:
✅ Converts PDF images into JPEG format
✅ Saves extracted images and embeds them into an HTML file
🔹 Ideal for scanned PDFs with graphical content.
4. Handling Scanned PDFs Using OCR (Tesseract OCR)
If a PDF contains scanned images of text, use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract text.
Install Tesseract OCR
For Linux (Ubuntu/Debian):
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr
For Windows:
- Download Tesseract OCR from GitHub Releases.
- Add
Tesseract-OCRto your system’s PATH variable.
Example: Convert Scanned PDF Text to HTML Using OCR
use thiagoalessio\TesseractOCR\TesseractOCR;
// Convert PDF to Image First
$imagick = new Imagick();
$imagick->readImage('scanned_document.pdf[0]');
$imagick->setImageFormat('png');
$imagick->writeImage('scanned_page.png');
// Run OCR on Extracted Image
$text = (new TesseractOCR('scanned_page.png'))->run();
$html = "<html><body><h1>Extracted OCR Text</h1><p>$text</p></body></html>";
file_put_contents('ocr_text.html', $html);
echo "Scanned PDF converted to searchable HTML!";
Why Use OCR?
✔ Extracts text from scanned documents
✔ Supports multiple languages (eng, spa, fra, etc.)
✔ Converts printed PDFs into searchable HTML
🔹 Great for digitizing invoices, contracts, and historical documents.
5. Converting Multi-Page PDFs to HTML Dynamically
For multi-page PDFs, process each page separately and generate a paginated HTML output.
Example: Convert Multi-Page PDFs to HTML
$parser = new Parser();
$pdf = $parser->parseFile('multipage.pdf');
$html = "<html><body><h1>Multi-Page PDF Content</h1>";
foreach ($pdf->getPages() as $index => $page) {
$html .= "<h2>Page " . ($index + 1) . "</h2>";
$html .= "<p>" . nl2br($page->getText()) . "</p>";
}
$html .= "</body></html>";
file_put_contents('multipage.html', $html);
echo "Multi-page PDF converted to HTML!";
✅ Generates separate sections per page for better readability.
6. Saving Extracted Text and Images in a Database
To store extracted PDF content, save it in a MySQL database.
Example: Save Extracted PDF Data to MySQL
$conn = new mysqli("localhost", "root", "", "pdf_data");
$text = $pdf->getText();
$stmt = $conn->prepare("INSERT INTO extracted_pdfs (content) VALUES (?)");
$stmt->bind_param("s", $text);
$stmt->execute();
echo "PDF text stored in the database!";
✅ Allows searching and retrieval of extracted PDF data dynamically.
7. Searching Extracted PDF Content on a Website
Once stored in a database, users can search for keywords inside extracted PDFs.
Example: Search for Keywords in Extracted PDFs
$query = "SELECT * FROM extracted_pdfs WHERE MATCH(content) AGAINST('invoice')";
$result = $conn->query($query);
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
echo "<p>" . $row['content'] . "</p>";
}
✅ Creates a web-based searchable PDF archive!
Best Practices for Converting PDFs to HTML in PHP
✔ Use PDFParser for text-based PDFs (faster and more accurate).
✔ Use OCR (Tesseract) for scanned PDFs (printed or handwritten text).
✔ Embed extracted images for better document visualization.
✔ Store extracted text in a database for easy retrieval and search.
✔ Paginate multi-page PDFs for better readability in HTML.
Conclusion
With PDFParser, FPDI, and Tesseract OCR, you can convert PDFs into structured HTML, making them searchable, accessible, and interactive.
✅ Extract text and images from PDFs dynamically.
✅ Convert scanned PDFs into searchable content using OCR.
✅ Store and search PDF content in a database.
✅ Display PDFs as interactive web pages.
By implementing these techniques, you can seamlessly integrate PDF content into web applications in PHP! 🚀