[LRUG] Best way to generate a PDF

[Alex Reis]

Hey Luke,

I'd say if you need such a lengthy template, without much data replacement
needed, definitely have a look at rtex and LaTeX. I've worked for a company
that was very happy in using LaTeX for business proposals, and have built
them a toolchain to generate new versions using rtex in a sinatra app.

Worth mentioning too if resorting to Java is an option; JasperReports makes
it really easy to generate data-driven reports, but it's more for table-ish
style reporting IMO, not the lengthy documents you spoke about.

Cheers,

Alex

Alexandre M. Reis
http://alexmreis.com
+32 484 77 99 27


On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 4:41 PM, David Burrows
<david at designsuperbuild.com>wrote:

> PDFKit does headers/footers, more info here
> http://metaskills.net/2011/03/20/pdfkit-overview-and-advanced-usage/
>
> --
> David Burrows
> 079 1234 2125
> @dburrows
>
> http://www.designsuperbuild.com/ | @dsgnsprbld
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Richard Livsey <richard at livsey.org>wrote:
>
>> I can't speak for PDFKit/wkhtmltopdf, but Flying Saucer supports
>> pagination and page numbering etc…
>>
>> You can use all the page-break properties in CSS:
>>
>> http://flyingsaucerproject.github.com/flyingsaucer/r8/guide/users-guide-R8.html#xil_37
>>
>> It supports the paged media CSS3 module so you can do stuff like
>>
>> @page {
>>   @top-right { content: "Page " counter(page); }
>>
>> }
>>
>>
>> More detail on that can be found here:
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-page/#margin-boxes
>>
>> Cheers.
>>
>>
>> On Tuesday, 12 February 2013 at 15:28, Luke Saunders wrote:
>>
>> > Hi all
>> >
>> > Thanks for the suggestions. In my case I assume it's not an option to
>> go via HTML as there is not really a concept of pages in HTML. So things
>> like a separate title page, repeated headers, page numbers etc would be
>> tricky right?
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > Luke
>> >
>> > On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 3:18 PM, 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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>> > > Chat at lists.lrug.org (mailto:Chat at lists.lrug.org)
>> > > http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>> >
>>
>>
>>
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