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Showing posts from December, 2009

Generating PDFs in Rails with Prawn and Prawnto

There are several different PDF generation libraries available for Rails apps. Some of these are PDF::Writer, Prawn, Ruport, RGhost, and FlyingSaucer (for JRuby). First off, Ruport is basically a higher-level API for PDF::Writer. FlyingSaucer is only for JRuby (because JRuby allows for loading of Java classes). Not having any experience with RGhost, I can't exactly write a guide for using it. So now it's basically between Prawn and PDF::Writer, unless there's another library I haven't hear of. However, to my dismay, there is not UTF-8 support in PDF::Writer. So Prawn ends up being the PDF generation library of choice. One thing to keep in mind is that Prawn and Prawnto are beta-stage (sometimes even alpha) libraries, so some code hacking is going to be necessary. Also note the Prawnto is not maintained or tested by the Prawn developers, so there's no guarantee that it'll work with future versions (especially since Prawnto's developer has been "below t