How to use special characters in FPDF

FPDF is a nice little library for php that allows you to create PDFs on the fly. It’s great for all sorts of document, amongs them invoices. Until you try to use say a pound (£) or euro (€) sign. Basically the library itself does not support utf-8, so the moment you need to insert anything extra into your document a conversion needs to be done.

To save you some searching and a masive panic attack here is the easy way to do it:

iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", "£");

You could also use the same command to do the whole text rather than just the pound sign itself. Example below:

You can use the iconv function at any point, however probably the easiest solution is to put it inside functions of the class you use to extend FPDF:

class myPdf extends FPDF {
    [...]
    public function showMoney($money){
        $this->cell(10,10,iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", "£"). $money,0);
    }
}

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