PDF Creation Best Practise

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi there,

I'm looking for a powerful pdf creation libary. I already tried:

prawn - Nice handling but way too slow when lots of tables are involved PDFKit - too slow

Actually I'm trying prince with xml input. It's pretty fast but I don't like the page-break control.

I need a libary which can create pdf's with up to 90 pages with lots of nested tables.

Does anyone have an idea?

Regards

2

I have used LaTeX with embedded ERB to generate 90+ page reports with quite a few tables (not nested though) in the past. This was used in a batch job that ran via Cron though, not in an interactive browser/user session.

LaTeX can be a bit daunting for a novice user and you will have to do a lot of ‘micromanagement’ to get the design looking like you want it (and not how LaTeX thinks it should look by default)

3

Hi Farrel,

ran into Latex too. Trying to work out some basic files at the moment. Do you know a good tutorial which includes rails usage?

Thanks in advance

4

Not in usage with Rails directly. I’ve had to hack a messy API to generate PDF documents from an ERB template. There might be some better publicly available Ruby/LaTeX APIs out there I did this a few years ago.

Farrel

5

How about prawn.

6

It's not a library, but I'm part of a project which provides a web api for compiling LaTeX documents. You can find out a bit more at http://clsi.scribtex.com (and if you want to run your own service, the code is available at https://github.com/scribtex/clsi ). The idea is that you can send a simple request with the content of your LaTeX document and some options, and the service will return you the pdf and log files. We're just starting to switch to offering this as a stable service, so send me an email if you'd like to know more or give it a try.

7

Hi,Sönke Buhr

Sorry for that i am a newer for the rails that i dont know how to help you.

But i have the problem on generating the pdf, i try prawn and PDFKit.both are unsuccessful, could you show me your steps you set up the prawn or PDFKit?

Thanks

Daisy