Question:

I would like to ask you a question please. I’m discussing one project with potential client and they have a bit of specific request. They want a system for ordering and printing jobs and one section of this system requires certain PHP manipulation. They would like to use a PDF template as one layer, allow user to define text (in a certain size, font type and colour) as another layer and then combine this into a single printable PDF.

Or it could be even in .ai Adobe Illustrator format but I am not aware of any technology that could do this, hence my suggestion with PDF.

Do you know of any technology, library or maybe even JavaScript library that could take PDF base template and then add customisable text on it and create PDF output?

I am not sure if that is what you want to do but I would create the template with php (for example using fPDF) and then create a tool that would let you edit the template's php allowing you to introduce changes to attributes like number of cells, cell height etc. and generate second PDF that meets your requirements (the final one).

You have to keep in mind there will be many potential problems, for example UTF-8 encoding, if you want to let the users select the font, etc.

If you can do it in PHP, there are <a href="http://www.tcpdf.org/" rel="nofollow">TCPDF</a> (which I used quite heavily without any problems) or <a href="http://www.fpdf.org/" rel="nofollow">FPDF</a>.<br /> Pretty powerful and very easy to use.

UPDATE: I just remembered <a href="http://www.setasign.com/products/fpdi/about/" rel="nofollow">this library, FPDI</a>: I never used it, but looks like it probably do exactly what you need.

<em>(But I now doubt I understood your question properly, because with a simple Google search you can find those very easily...Did I miss something?)</em>

You could try PDF overlays. There are several PDF libraries that can do this. Here is how to do with my company's product: <a href="http://www.gnostice.com/nl_article.asp?id=148&t=PDF_Overlay_Stitching_PDF_Pages_Together_in_NET" rel="nofollow">http://www.gnostice.com/nl_article.asp?id=148&t=PDF_Overlay_Stitching_PDF_Pages_Together_in_NET</a>

<img alt="This image shows two pdf pages that have been overlaid." class="b-lazy" data-src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/JAGSb.png" data-original="https://i.stack.imgur.com/JAGSb.png" src="https://etrip.eimg.top/images/2019/05/07/timg.gif" />