Prawn : Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generator Release Version 0.1.0
= Description:
Prawn is a new pure Ruby PDF generation library, with the long term goal of providing a suitable replacement for PDF::Writer. It is being developed under the auspices of the Ruby Mendicant project with copious help from a number of mighty fine contributors.
= Features:
This list isn't comprehensive, but Prawn has:
* Elementary text and graphics operations * Support for built-in Adobe fonts (AFM) * Support for TTF embedding without the need to generate an AFM file * Automated page flow and text wrapping, with support for many page sizes * Basic text kerning support * Cool 'bounding box' concept that eliminates lots of coordinate math * m17n via UTF-8 text rendering (Auto-conversion of encodings on Ruby 1.9) * Support for JPEG and PNG image embedding (Including PNG Transparencies) * Growing spec suite (PDF::Reader based), and example set * Full Support for Ruby 1.9 * Orders of magnitude faster than PDF::Writer for table generation
= News:
After several non-release checkpoints, I've finally packaged up Prawn for your alpha-testing enjoyment. The Ruby Mendicant project will continue until 2008.09.16, which means I still have about 6 weeks of full time work available.
The next step is to get Prawn integrated into Ruport, but I estimate this will only take a week or two. After that, I will literally be working full time implementing feature requests from our users until mid-September. I will of course continue to maintain the project after that, but now is your chance to try things out and report problems / request features while there is still a dedicated focus on this project.
Prawn is likely not yet ready for production, but is already useful for many purposes. Please report problems and make suggestions after trying this release.
= Install:
gem install prawn
Alternatively, you can clone the git repository with:
git clone git://github.com/sandal/prawn.git
= Resources:
- Project webpage with basic overview and some examples / sample PDFs: http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com
- API Documentation: http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/docs/
- Github http://github.com/sandal/prawn
- Mailing List http://groups.google.com/group/prawn-ruby
- Bug Tracker / Wiki: http://prawn.lighthouseapp.com
- RubyForge Page: http://rubyforge.org/projects/prawn
- Prawnto, an unofficial Rails plugin for Prawn: http://cracklabs.com/prawnto
There is also almost always a few people lurking / chatting in #prawn on irc.freenode.net. I am <sandal> there.
= Acknowledgements:
I will be putting together a comprehensive acknowledgments page some time before the end of the Ruby Mendicant project, because there are so many people who have helped me out in the last several months. However, I'd like to send special thanks to James Healy and Michael Daines who have done some really critical work on the project and I'd be much farther behind without their contributions.
= Until next time
Please enjoy Prawn and get in touch with suggestions!
-greg