[LRUG] Best way to generate a PDF

[Andy Olliver]

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> 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> 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
>>
>>
>> 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.
>> >
>>
>>
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>
>
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