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Generating Rich PDFs with Prawn
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Matthew Bass
August 18, 2009
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Generating Rich PDFs with Prawn
Leverage Prawn from your Ruby scripts to generate rich, professional-looking PDFs.
Matthew Bass
August 18, 2009
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Transcript
Generating Rich PDFs with Prawn Matthew Bass
Should my app even be generating PDFs?
The alternatives... • PDF::Writer http://ruby-pdf.rubyforge.org/pdf-writer/ • Ruby FPDF http://zeropluszero.com/software/fpdf/ •
And... that’s it?
PDF::Writer • The best choice for a long time... •
Much slower than Prawn • Markup isn’t as nice
• Port of FPDF written in PHP • Nice logo?
• ???
Prawn gives you PDF goodness... • Fast • Clean syntax*
• Image embedding, tables, etc. • Full UTF-8 support • PNGs with alpha transparencies
Caveat... http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com
History... • Founded April, 2008 by Gregory Brown • ...the
guy who brought us Ruport • Ruby Mendicant project
The gems... prawn-core http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com prawn-layout http://github.com/sandal/prawn-layout/ prawn-format http://github.com/sandal/prawn-format/
Installation Options # Clone from the repository git clone git://github.com/sandal/prawn.git
# Install the gem directly sudo gem install prawn Keepin’ it simple...
Kickin’ it up a notch... Installation Options rake gems:install rake
gems:unpack # optional
Or configure your Rails project for the latest release of
prawn-core and extensions... Installation Options rake gems:install rake gems:unpack # optional
What can it do?
Tables... Exact positioning... Italic, bold, etc... Drawing...
Image embedding... Background colors... UTF-8...
Rails integration...
Inline HTML formatting with prawn-format Speed observations... it’s faster!
Code Examples
Text...
Positioning...
Drawing...
Colors...
Embedding images...
prawn-layout Adds support for tables, grid layouts, etc.
prawn-format Adds support for inline formatting w/HTML tags
prawnto some_controller.rb default.prawn Tasty with Rails! Use helpers, instance vars,
etc. in your views
Bugs & Gotchas • Adobe Reader incompatibilities • Occasional UTF-8
errors • Spotty error handling • prawn-format doesn’t like some chars (gt, lt)
Background Processing Can’t beat delayed_job for simplicity... http://github.com/tobi/delayed_job/ # Run
queued jobs rake jobs:work
Conclusion!
Matthew Bass matthewbass.com ©2009 Adeptware, Inc.