Generating Rich PDFs with Prawn

Leverage Prawn from your Ruby scripts to generate rich, professional-looking PDFs.

1. Generating Rich PDFs with Prawn Matthew Bass
2. Should my app even be generating PDFs?
3. The alternatives... • PDF::Writer http://ruby-pdf.rubyforge.org/pdf-writer/ • Ruby FPDF http://zeropluszero.com/software/fpdf/ • And... that’s it?
4. PDF::Writer • The best choice for a long time... • Much slower than Prawn • Markup isn’t as nice
5. • Port of FPDF written in PHP • Nice logo? • ???
6. Prawn gives you PDF goodness... • Fast • Clean syntax* • Image embedding, tables, etc. • Full UTF-8 support • PNGs with alpha transparencies
7. Caveat... http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com
8. History... • Founded April, 2008 by Gregory Brown • ...the guy who brought us Ruport • Ruby Mendicant project
9. The gems... prawn-core http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com prawn-layout http://github.com/sandal/prawn-layout/ prawn-format http://github.com/sandal/prawn-format/
10. 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...
11. Kickin’ it up a notch... Installation Options rake gems:install rake gems:unpack # optional
12. Or configure your Rails project for the latest release of prawn-core and extensions... Installation Options rake gems:install rake gems:unpack # optional
13. What can it do?
14. Tables... Exact positioning... Italic, bold, etc... Drawing...
15. Image embedding... Background colors... UTF-8...
16. Rails integration...
17. Inline HTML formatting with prawn-format Speed observations... it’s faster!
18. Code Examples
19. Text...
20. Positioning...
21. Drawing...
22. Colors...
23. Embedding images...
24. prawn-layout Adds support for tables, grid layouts, etc.
25. prawn-format Adds support for inline formatting w/HTML tags
26. prawnto some_controller.rb default.prawn Tasty with Rails! Use helpers, instance vars, etc. in your views
27. Bugs & Gotchas • Adobe Reader incompatibilities • Occasional UTF-8 errors • Spotty error handling • prawn-format doesn’t like some chars (gt, lt)
28. Background Processing Can’t beat delayed_job for simplicity... http://github.com/tobi/delayed_job/ # Run queued jobs rake jobs:work
29. Conclusion!
30. Matthew Bass matthewbass.com ©2009 Adeptware, Inc.