Prawn 0.2 - Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generation

Prawn : Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generator Release Version 0.2.0

= 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:

This is the second major release of Prawn and includes many new features and bug fixes. You can find a full release summary on my blog at:

http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/archives/2008.09/prawn_0_2.html

= 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.

Thanks to all who helped out with this release!

= Until next time

Please enjoy Prawn and get in touch with suggestions!