Add Emoji support to Dompdf

Attempting to generate a PDF with 🚀👌 😉 and getting 𐈉𐈉𐈉? Googling has led you there: https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf/issues/1698, where you learned that the problem is hard, not solved yet, and that emojis support should be added to php-font-lib first? What should you do next if you still want emojis in your generated PDF?

A temporary solution (until emoji support is added to php-font-lib) is to replace emojis with PNGs

We'll use the iamcal/php-emoji package, which will replace all emojis with PNG images accordingly. So first run:

composer require iamcal/php-emoji

Then we need to set chroot of Dompdf to the path to the PNG and CSS with emojis.

$options = new Options();
$options->setChroot(base_path('vendor/iamcal/php-emoji/lib'));
$dompdf = new Dompdf($options);

Include php-emoji CSS file in the HTML from which you are creating the PDF

<link href="absolute-path-to/vendor/iamcal/php-emoji/lib/emoji.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Use emoji_unified_to_html() function to replace emojis with PNG images

emoji_unified_to_html("<p>Html code with emojis: ❤️</p>")

Enjoy!