[LRUG] Best way to generate a PDF

[Richard Livsey]

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 
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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)> 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.
>