[LRUG] Best way to generate a PDF

[Avik Sengupta]

Hi,

I think the important question is, do you need to do complex but flexible
layouts? Ie, do you have multiple dynamic text bodies that need to flow
automatically. As opposed to having a fixed layout where you know the
absolute positions of all elements in your document, or have a single wall
of text flowing over multiple pages.

If you have to do flexible layouts, you are best off using FOP.  Use your
favourite templating engine to inject your data and create a xsl:fo
document, which you pass to FOP. To do professional quality documents with
complex layouts, nothing beats this methodology. Highly recommended.

Regards
-
Avik


On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Luke Saunders <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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20130212/f8c60ad6/attachment-0003.html>