[LRUG] Best way to generate a PDF

Tue Feb 12 09:14:30 PST 2013

I haven't done much with PDFs, but for the little I have done I've used Prawn. It is a low-level library, but it's really quick and easy to wrap your head around it. I got a multi-page PDF with cutting margins for tickets each with unique serial numbers and a bunch of instructions done in 2 hours a few years ago.

As for your issue, it sounds like you need to commit a long piece of text/article to the PDF. The only problem I foresee is if the text is free-form, it could get tricky to figure out when a paragraph doesn't fit on current page and needs to move to the next. In which case a HTML to PDF converter might be a better choice, hopefully without too much headache from getting it to parse/render the HTML/CSS the way you want.

</my-two-cents>  

-jimeh

On Tuesday, 12 February 2013 at 16:46, Hakan Şenol Ensari wrote:

> If you simply need to lay out several pages with some images and text, you have no reason not to use Prawn.
>  
>  
> On 12 February 2013 16:36, Andy Olliver <andy.olliver at artirix.com (mailto:andy.olliver at artirix.com)> wrote:
> > Luke
> > Just seen your post re not using HTML - so wicked_pdf gem is not so good for you.
> > Apache FOP (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/)  works well to create PDF's using the XSL-FO spec - this is java, but can be called from shell, so can be used from a Rails app. Create XML for content data, and pass to formatting engine with reference to appropriate templates.
> >  
> > One of the issues I've experienced with PDF creation is the issue of text size, white-space, page-breaks etc.. It can be quite a challenge to come up with a graphic design that flows, and can accommodate variable content length while using a fixed page size. I've seen ways of adding conditional formatting to PDF's using Adobe tools and embedded scripting in layout templates, and then almost anything is possible..
> >  
> >  
> >  
> > On 12 February 2013 16:12, Andy Olliver <andy.olliver at artirix.com (mailto:andy.olliver at artirix.com)> wrote:
> > > I've just done some work using wicked_pdf gem - this worked well for us.
> > > Be very careful regarding capacity planning when adding something like this into a Rails web-app - long running requests are bad news. For anything other than v.low request rate, consider adding a worker Q, with client polling for success / fail / timeout etc.
> > >  
> > >  
> > >  
> > > On 12 February 2013 15:18, Richard Livsey <richard at livsey.org (mailto:richard at livsey.org)> wrote:
> > > > I've had good results with using Flying Saucer - https://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer
> > > >  
> > > > It's Java, but easy to use with JRuby or just make a standalone executable and call out to that to generate PDFs from HTML & CSS.
> > > > I found it much better than wkhtmltopdf for the kind of PDFs I was generating, but probably worth giving PDFKit a try first to see if that suits your needs.
> > > >  
> > > > Cheers.
> > > >  
> > > > --
> > > > Richard Livsey
> > > > Co-Founder, MinuteBase
> > > > Meeting collaboration made easy
> > > > http://minutebase.com
> > > > +44 (0) 7841 260 797 (tel:%2B44%20%280%29%207841%20260%20797)
> > > >  
> > > >  
> > > > On Tuesday, 12 February 2013 at 15:12, Mooktakim Ahmed wrote:
> > > >  
> > > > > Hey,
> > > > >
> > > > > Recently i have used https://github.com/pdfkit/PDFKit. One good thing about it is that you can set it up as a middleware which translates HTML into PDF just by going to the .pdf extension.
> > > > > It might not be good fit for you. But for me, it was a nice way to quickly get PDF generation working, without adding too much messy code. Especially good if you need to convert HTML to PDF.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Regards,
> > > > > Mooktakim Ahmed
> > > > >
> > > > > On 12 February 2013 15:06, Luke Saunders <luke at sketchconsulting.com (mailto:luke at sketchconsulting.com) (mailto:luke at sketchconsulting.com)> wrote:
> > > > > > Hi LRUG
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Can anyone with recent experience in this recommend the best tool to use in order to generate a PDF from a Ruby (Rails) app?
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Said PDF will be an A4 document, with a title page, followed by 5-10 content pages each with a standard header / footer including page numbers. Content pages consist of headings and paragraphs, along with some embedded images.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I used prawn (https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn) once to generate a business card sized PDF and that was fine, but I'm wondering if perhaps a markup, maybe like LaTeX would be wise to generate this kind of doc.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Keen to make the right choice and I think making the wrong choice could eat a lot of time here.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Thanks!
> > > > > > Luke.
> > > > >
> > > >  
> > > >  
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