Generate PDF from Rails

Question

The Ruby On Rails Wiki lists a couple of libraries that facilitate PDF generation in Rails. I need to print out address labels (in letter format, thus 12-15 addresses per page) and cannot decide which one to use. Any recommendations?

Answer 1

The best I've seen so far is Prawn:

• Prawn http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/
• http://advent2008.hackruby.com/past/2008/12/17/awn_and_the_future_of_ruby_pdf_generation/
• http://railstips.org/2008/10/14/how-to-generate-pdfs-in-rails-with-prawn
• Prawn Rails plugin: http://www.cracklabs.com/prawnto

Answer 2

I've used both PDF::Writer and Prawn and find Prawn much more pleasant to use. Check out Ruby Mendicant for a comparison that demonstrates the joys of Prawn w/r/t PDF::Writer.

Actually, just check out Ruby Mendicant anyway for a great design pattern for right livelihood as a developer.

Answer 3

There's also RTeX. That works well if you're willing to translate to LaTeX first. LaTeX is a very good way to store marked-up documents. It just depends on how static each document is. If most of the document is dynamic, you might do better with Prawn or PDF::Writer. If most of it is static, with just a couple of text-replacements for each, LaTeX might be a better choice.

Answer 4

Prawn with Prawnto for sure. The DSL is a real treat, as is the simplicity of being able to treat PDF as any other format in a respond_to format block:

respond_to do |format|
format.pdf { render :layout => false }

I'm not sure whether PDF::Writer is as elegant. I wrote a very basic tutorial on Prawn and Prawnto for Rails beginners here:

Answer 5

Prawn is the way to go. Now with prawn-grids it is really easy to do.

Check out the fill article here:

http://www.ducksoupsoftware.com/blog/200907/rails_labels.html

The code example from the site:

## Controller
prawnto :prawn => {:left_margin => 0.21975.in, 
                   :right_margin => 0.21975.in}

## View
pdf.define_grid(:columns => 3, :rows => 10, :column_gutter => 10)

pdf.grid.rows.times do |i|
  pdf.grid.columns.times do |j|
    b = pdf.grid(i,j)
    pdf.bounding_box b.top_left, :width => b.width, :height => b.height do
      pdf.text b.name
      pdf.stroke do
        pdf.rectangle(pdf.bounds.top_left, b.width, b.height)
      end
    end
  end
end

Answer 6

Though not completely ruby, you could use OpenOffice .odt to generate PDFs by combining serenity and docsplit.

http://github.com/kremso/serenity

http://documentcloud.github.com/docsplit/

Or you could use the clamsy gem which uses odt and cups-pdf to generate the PDF.

http://github.com/ngty/clamsy