3 ms·

Prawn is pretty neat, but what I'd really like to see is HTML to PDF in pure Ruby. I had to use a Java library wrapped in a Ruby module to do this. Complicates

by rubeng 17y ago

Prawn is pretty neat, but what I'd really like to see is HTML to PDF in pure Ruby. I had to use a Java library wrapped in a Ruby module to do this. Complicates my server configuration (needs the JVM) more than I'd like.

petesalty 17y ago
You can try HTMLDOC (http://htmldoc.rubyforge.org/ http://htmldoc.rubyforge.org/) which is a wrapper around a C library (I believe) that does exactly this. I've used it before, it's pretty fast and stable and you don't have to worry about JVM.
jmonegro 17y ago
There are many webservices out there (paid and free) that do this for you. You might want to consider that instead.
rufo 17y ago
Any details you can share? I may have a need of something similar.
- sandal 17y ago
  The best way to do this is FlyingSaucer via JRuby. https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/
  - rubeng 17y ago
    I thought about that but I didn't want my entire app running within the JVM.
    - sandal 17y ago
      You probably wouldn't have to do that. Check into something like resque: http://github.com/defunkt/resque http://github.com/defunkt/resque (depends upon your needs, of course)
- rubeng 17y ago
  Yeah, I used Flying Saucer: https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ Only, I needed to parse plain HTML (not just XHTML) so I'm using TagSoup as the replacement parser: http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/ http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/ This combination is awesome.
sandal 17y ago
I'm the maintainer of Prawn, and yeah, it'd be nice to see this. Jamis Buck tried this with prawn-format, but after a while we dropped support for it because it fell behind our core library and started breaking (Jamis had since moved on to other things). In order for this to happen, what we really need is a solid box model. Since we don't have that yet, it's a very hard problem. If someone wanted to pay me to work on it full time for a year, I could get it built. But failing that, we'll have to wait a good deal of time for this, unless someone else finds a large chunk of dedicated time for it. Until then, Flying Saucer is the way to go if you can't afford PrinceXML price tag.
- rubeng 17y ago
  Agreed. That's what I ended up using and it's fantastic. Great CSS support and coupled with the TagSoup parser, you can convert almost anything.
oomkiller 17y ago
Try Princely (blog post: http://jimneath.org/2009/02/16/creating-pdf-documents-in-ruby-on-rails/ http://jimneath.org/2009/02/16/creating-pdf-documents-in-rub...) http://github.com/mbleigh/princely http://github.com/mbleigh/princely
- rubeng 17y ago
  That's just a wrapper over Prince XML, I ended up writing my own wrapper over Flying Saucer: https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/
- jdelsman 17y ago
  +1. This is much better than the current prawn/prawnto DSL. Its just much more recognisable as a language to create PDFs in HTML/CSS.

by rubeng 17y ago

petesalty 17y ago

You can try HTMLDOC (http://htmldoc.rubyforge.org/ http://htmldoc.rubyforge.org/) which is a wrapper around a C library (I believe) that does exactly this. I've used it before, it's pretty fast and stable and you don't have to worry about JVM.

jmonegro 17y ago

There are many webservices out there (paid and free) that do this for you. You might want to consider that instead.

rufo 17y ago

Any details you can share? I may have a need of something similar.

sandal 17y ago
The best way to do this is FlyingSaucer via JRuby. https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/
- rubeng 17y ago
  I thought about that but I didn't want my entire app running within the JVM.
  - sandal 17y ago
    You probably wouldn't have to do that. Check into something like resque: http://github.com/defunkt/resque http://github.com/defunkt/resque (depends upon your needs, of course)
rubeng 17y ago
Yeah, I used Flying Saucer: https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ Only, I needed to parse plain HTML (not just XHTML) so I'm using TagSoup as the replacement parser: http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/ http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/ This combination is awesome.

sandal 17y ago

I'm the maintainer of Prawn, and yeah, it'd be nice to see this. Jamis Buck tried this with prawn-format, but after a while we dropped support for it because it fell behind our core library and started breaking (Jamis had since moved on to other things). In order for this to happen, what we really need is a solid box model. Since we don't have that yet, it's a very hard problem. If someone wanted to pay me to work on it full time for a year, I could get it built. But failing that, we'll have to wait a good deal of time for this, unless someone else finds a large chunk of dedicated time for it. Until then, Flying Saucer is the way to go if you can't afford PrinceXML price tag.

rubeng 17y ago
Agreed. That's what I ended up using and it's fantastic. Great CSS support and coupled with the TagSoup parser, you can convert almost anything.

oomkiller 17y ago

Try Princely (blog post: http://jimneath.org/2009/02/16/creating-pdf-documents-in-ruby-on-rails/ http://jimneath.org/2009/02/16/creating-pdf-documents-in-rub...) http://github.com/mbleigh/princely http://github.com/mbleigh/princely

rubeng 17y ago
That's just a wrapper over Prince XML, I ended up writing my own wrapper over Flying Saucer: https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/ https://xhtmlrenderer.dev.java.net/
jdelsman 17y ago
+1. This is much better than the current prawn/prawnto DSL. Its just much more recognisable as a language to create PDFs in HTML/CSS.