Princely - Prince XML PDF Wrapper Plugin

rubyonrails-talk
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Recently I was implementing PDF generation for a project utilizing the fantastic library Prince XML (http://www.princexml.com). I came across a blog article with a basic library and helper set for Prince (http:// sublog.subimage.com/articles/2007/05/29/html-css-to-pdf-using-ruby-on- rails), which provided a great basis. I wanted to make something a little more generalized and in-keeping the Rails Way, so I have created 'Princely', a simple wrapper utilizing much of the code from the SubImage library but giving it better helpers and pluginizing its inclusion.

== Installation ==

The first step is to download Prince (Prince - Download Prince 14.3) and install it on your platform of choice (only Linux and Mac OS X supported by the plugin at this time). Next, simply install the plugin:

script/install plugin http://svn.intridea.com/svn/public/princely

You are now ready to get started using Princely to generate PDF. Note that Princely is only compatible with Rails >= 2.0

== Usage ==

Princely uses the MimeTypes and respond_to blocks from Rails 2.0 to add PDF as a render option and a format. Because of this, it's incredibly easy to implement a PDF! Simply make your XHTML or XML template and use pdf as the format (e.g. show.pdf.erb), then add code similar to this in your controller:

class PagesController < ApplicationController def show    respond_to do |format|      format.html      format.pdf {        render :pdf => @page.pdf_name,               :template => "show.pdf.erb", # not required, shown for example               :layout => false # not required      }    end end end

And that's all there is to it! If you add a .pdf to your properly routed path, you should be presented with a PDF version of the page generated by Prince. The README (http://svn.intridea.com/svn/public/ princely/README) has more detailed usage information.

There is a Trac (http://trac.intridea.com/trac/public/) available for any bugs or patches you might come across. Additionally you can comment on this at the original blog post (http://www.intridea.com/ 2007/12/20/announcing-princely-rails-prince-xml-pdf-wrapper).

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Just as an update for those interested, the path supplied for the plugin is no longer valid. Its been moved from a svn repository to git and is available at the following location:

http://github.com/mbleigh/princely/tree/master