A template is reusable artwork: a form XObject drawn once and placed any number of times.
$header = $doc->template(Dimensions::mm(210, 30)); // its own canvas and origin
$header->canvas()->setFillColor(Cmyk::fromPercent(100, 44, 0, 0))->fillRect(0, 0, $header->width(), $header->height());
$header->canvas()->fitTextline('Php2Pdf', $bold, 24, new Box(80, 0, 300, $header->height()), TextlineOptions::at(Position::centerLeft()));
$page->place($header, Box::fromMm(0, 267, 210, 30), Fit::entire());
Text flows and tables go into a template’s canvas, or any canvas, with fitInto():
$flow->fitInto($header->canvas(), $box). On a page, $page->fitTextflow() and
$page->fitTable() do the same.
Templates can be drawn on until the document closes. asTransparencyGroup() makes the form a
transparency group, so a group opacity or blend mode applied when placing it composites its
content as one object.
Pages of existing PDFs (and Illustrator .ai files saved PDF-compatible) become templates:
$layout = $doc->import('layout.ai'); // or Document::import(PdfFile::open(...))
$page->place($layout->page(1), $page->trimBox(), Fit::entire());
$page->place($layout->page(2, PageBox::Trim), Box::fromMm(20, 20, 80, 100), Fit::meet());
Each imported page is bounded by one of its boxes (PageBox::Crop by default) and honours its
/Rotate. Everything the page references is copied into the output; objects shared between
pages of the same file (fonts, images, colour spaces) are written once.
Layers (optional content groups) the placed pages use are merged into the document with the source’s default state, so guide or dieline layers switched off in Illustrator stay off, and appear in a viewer’s layers panel in the source’s order. Acrobat, poppler and Ghostscript honour them; macOS Preview ignores layers inside placed artwork and draws hidden ones. To hide them everywhere, remove them on import:
$layout = $doc->import('layout.ai', HiddenLayers::Remove);
Content marked with a layer that is off by default (directly, or through a membership dictionary and its visibility policy) is cut from the page and from the forms it draws, and the layer is left out of the layers panel. Visible layers stay switchable.
The reader handles classic cross-reference tables, cross-reference streams and object streams, chains of incremental updates, and rebuilds the cross-reference by scanning the file when offsets are wrong. Flate (with PNG and TIFF predictors), LZW, ASCIIHex, ASCII85 and RunLength streams are decoded; image codecs pass through. Encrypted files are rejected.
$file = PdfFile::open('layout.pdf');
$file->pageCount(); $file->version(); $file->info(); // Title, Author, ... as UTF-8
$p = $file->page(1);
$p->mediaBox(); $p->cropBox(); $p->trimBox(); $p->bleedBox(); $p->artBox(); $p->rotation();
This lets layouts be driven from a template’s own geometry, for example placing a text box inside an imported page’s trim box.