From: ara.t.howard@...
Date: 2006-11-16T10:50:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails view as PDF... suggestions?

On Thu, 16 Nov 2006, J. B. Rainsberger wrote:

> Hi, everybody!
>
> I am about to do some research tomorrow, but if any of you has an obvious 
> answer, then that would help. I am looking to build PDFs from Rails views, 
> and I'd like some guidance on how to go about it.
>
> If this is not the right forum, feel free to forward me to a better one.
>
> I want to put placeholders, both text and images, onto a template and end up 
> with a PDF. I'm pretty open about how that all happens, so feel free to make 
> wild suggestions. The only important constraint I can think of is that layout 
> (meaning spacing) matters, so relying on a browser rendering HTML is probably 
> not an option. The template will be a kind of background on which the 
> placeholders will be laid out, and I imagine it's the template that will be 
> the tricky part.
>
> I have looked into PDF::Writer, but I'm not sure whether we'll need to draw 
> the templates or not. If we get the template as a pre-rendered file (say PDF, 
> RTF, whatever), then I'd like to be able to overlay the placeholders onto the 
> template and merge.
>
> So, any suggestions? Any questions for me? Any choice Google keywords you 
> care to suggest? I could really use your help.
>
> Take care.

look at this too

   http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/~paxton/tioga.html

depending on your needs it might fill them quite nicely

pdf::writer is nice too - i think they are taking quite different approaches
and fill different niches.

-a
-- 
my religion is very simple.  my religion is kindness. -- the dalai lama