[LRUG] Best way to generate a PDF

[Luke Saunders]

I will have flexible layouts. For example there might be an image aligned
on the right with text flowing around it on the left. And I won't be able
to manually figure out where the page breaks will go.

That said, from what everyone is saying about PDFKit (and I think Flying
Saucer) this will be fine. If repeating footers, dynamic page breaks etc
are not a problem with those tools, this is quite tempting as it will be
fast to develop and easy to test.

I did use XSL-FO with FOP some years ago (though had forgotten what it was
called until Andy and you mentioned it) and it was quite time consuming,
but it once built it was fast to produce the pdf and the results looked
great. There's a similar argument for LaTeX, but I think in this case that
will be harder to style.

My current thinking is to try PDFKit first and if that doesn't work out
move to either XSL-FO or LaTeX depending on how important the design is to
the client.

Thanks all. This thread is a goldmine - all are good options and suitable
for different use cases.

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 6:28 PM, Avik Sengupta <avik at sengupta.net> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
>
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