First and foremost, a heartfelt thank you to every contributor who has opened a pull request, filed an issue, or taken the time to improve TCPDF. Your generosity, patience, and expertise have kept this library alive and useful for hundreds of thousands of projects around the world. It truly means a lot, and none of this would have been possible without you.
TCPDF 6 is now deprecated
After more than two decades of active development, TCPDF 6 is now considered deprecated. The library still works, but it was designed for a very different era of PHP and PDF generation. The internal architecture has grown organically over the years into a single, monolithic file of roughly 30 000 lines that is extremely hard to test, maintain, or extend safely. No further changes will be merged.
The successor: tc-lib-pdf
The modern replacement is tc-lib-pdf, a ground-up rewrite of the same functionality designed with modern PHP in mind.
It is object-oriented and PSR-compliant. Each subsystem (color, barcode, font, unicode, graphics, etc.) lives in its own Composer package. Every package is covered by unit tests and static analysis, with continuous validation in CI. All legacy TCPDF features are supported and new capabilities that were not feasible in the monolithic design, such as better font subsetting, improved HTML/CSS layout, cleaner page-box and prepress support, structured tree tagging, PDF import, and advanced digital signatures with timestamps, are already available. Migration documentation and a growing set of examples (E000-E075+) are included in the repository.
A future TCPDF 7 major version
I am also planning a new TCPDF major release that will keep the familiar TCPDF class API as a thin compatibility wrapper, but delegate all the real work to tc-lib-pdf internally. This would let existing projects continue to use TCPDF with minimal or no code changes while benefiting from the modern backend.
This is a substantial effort and it will require some breaking changes. The legacy public API exposes hundreds of methods with complex, sometimes overlapping behavior. Many internal side effects (font stack state, coordinate transformations, template scoping, and more) are tightly coupled in ways that do not map cleanly to tc-lib-pdf. On top of that, every edge case in the historical rendering pipeline must be validated against the new backend. If your project can accommodate it, migrating directly to tc-lib-pdf is strongly recommended rather than waiting for the compatibility wrapper.
What to do with issues and PRs
I would warmly encourage you to check whether the issue is already resolved in tc-lib-pdf and, if not, to open a PR or issue there. If you need help translating your fix to the new library, please open a discussion and I will do my best to guide you.
Support development
If TCPDF and tc-lib-pdf are valuable to your work, please consider supporting ongoing development with a sponsorship. Financial support helps fund maintenance, bug fixes, documentation, testing infrastructure, and long-term improvements.
You can sponsor the project here: https://github.com/sponsors/tecnickcom
Thank you again for your time and your continued support.
First and foremost, a heartfelt thank you to every contributor who has opened a pull request, filed an issue, or taken the time to improve TCPDF. Your generosity, patience, and expertise have kept this library alive and useful for hundreds of thousands of projects around the world. It truly means a lot, and none of this would have been possible without you.
TCPDF 6 is now deprecated
After more than two decades of active development, TCPDF 6 is now considered deprecated. The library still works, but it was designed for a very different era of PHP and PDF generation. The internal architecture has grown organically over the years into a single, monolithic file of roughly 30 000 lines that is extremely hard to test, maintain, or extend safely. No further changes will be merged.
The successor: tc-lib-pdf
The modern replacement is tc-lib-pdf, a ground-up rewrite of the same functionality designed with modern PHP in mind.
It is object-oriented and PSR-compliant. Each subsystem (color, barcode, font, unicode, graphics, etc.) lives in its own Composer package. Every package is covered by unit tests and static analysis, with continuous validation in CI. All legacy TCPDF features are supported and new capabilities that were not feasible in the monolithic design, such as better font subsetting, improved HTML/CSS layout, cleaner page-box and prepress support, structured tree tagging, PDF import, and advanced digital signatures with timestamps, are already available. Migration documentation and a growing set of examples (E000-E075+) are included in the repository.
A future TCPDF 7 major version
I am also planning a new TCPDF major release that will keep the familiar
TCPDFclass API as a thin compatibility wrapper, but delegate all the real work to tc-lib-pdf internally. This would let existing projects continue to use TCPDF with minimal or no code changes while benefiting from the modern backend.This is a substantial effort and it will require some breaking changes. The legacy public API exposes hundreds of methods with complex, sometimes overlapping behavior. Many internal side effects (font stack state, coordinate transformations, template scoping, and more) are tightly coupled in ways that do not map cleanly to tc-lib-pdf. On top of that, every edge case in the historical rendering pipeline must be validated against the new backend. If your project can accommodate it, migrating directly to tc-lib-pdf is strongly recommended rather than waiting for the compatibility wrapper.
What to do with issues and PRs
I would warmly encourage you to check whether the issue is already resolved in tc-lib-pdf and, if not, to open a PR or issue there. If you need help translating your fix to the new library, please open a discussion and I will do my best to guide you.
Support development
If TCPDF and tc-lib-pdf are valuable to your work, please consider supporting ongoing development with a sponsorship. Financial support helps fund maintenance, bug fixes, documentation, testing infrastructure, and long-term improvements.
You can sponsor the project here: https://github.com/sponsors/tecnickcom
Thank you again for your time and your continued support.