[LRUG] Best way to generate a PDF

Tue Feb 12 10:10:32 PST 2013

I'd add to this that developing by rendering as HTML in the browser first is a hell of a lot quicker than generating the PDF and trying to figure out what's going on. 

You can also use standard RSpec etc... to test the contents of the HTML and make sure it's correct, I'm not sure how you'd go about doing the same with the final PDF. I test the HTML for content and then just test that a PDF of > 0 bytes was generated from it. 

Cheers. 

On Tuesday, 12 February 2013 at 17:31, Max Williams wrote:

> I'd recommend still using Flying Saucer and doing it via html. Adding page numbers and headers is easy enough with rails, rendering the same partial repeatedly with different page numbers or whatever. Whichever system you use you'll need to become familiar with the layout rules, and you're probably familiar with html & css already, so why not use that? You can write your own html to a file and pass it to FS, or use acts_as_flying_saucer which basically does this for you. You can also use your own custom ruby logic to decide whether to split up longer paras etc. 
> 
> On 12 February 2013 15:28, Luke Saunders <luke at sketchconsulting.com (mailto:luke at sketchconsulting.com)> 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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