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.<div><br></div><div>
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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.<br><br>Thanks all. This thread is a goldmine - all are good options and suitable for different use cases.</div>
<div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 6:28 PM, Avik Sengupta <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:avik@sengupta.net" target="_blank">avik@sengupta.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">Hi,<div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Regards</div><div>-</div><div>Avik</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div>On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Luke Saunders <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:luke@sketchconsulting.com" target="_blank">luke@sketchconsulting.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div>Hi LRUG<div><br></div><div>Can anyone with recent experience in this recommend the best tool to use in order to generate a PDF from a Ruby (Rails) app?</div>
<div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I used <a href="https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn" target="_blank">prawn</a> 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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Keen to make the right choice and I think making the wrong choice could eat a lot of time here.</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks!</div><span><font color="#888888"><div>Luke.</div>
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