I was recently plagued with a problem at work where a previously working document produced by one of our software applications was not including text anymore. Table borders and images were fine, and even some custom page footers we were generating through the use of the $pdf global variable was appearing okay.

After a lot of headache, I finally tracked down the issue. After re-uploading some files to our web server, the owner of the lib/fonts folder had changed. A simple ownership change resolved the issue for me…

chown wwwrun:www /path/to/web/server/www/app/inc/pdf/lib/fonts

I made of use of Dom PDF’s built in debugging (which is turned off by default), and some hefty XDebug use. You can find Dom PDF’s debug settings in dompdf_config.inc.php in the root of the Dom PDF installation.