From: Jeff Barczewski <jeff.barczewski@...>
Date: 2006-11-17T05:02:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails view as PDF... suggestions?

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On 11/15/06, Kouhei Sutou <kou@cozmixng.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> 2006/11/16, J. B. Rainsberger <jbrains762@gmail.com>:
>
> > 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.
>
> > 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.
>
> My suggestion is the following:
>
>   1. make a SVG for template with Illustrator, Inkscape and so on
>   2. substitute placeholders in the SVG by ERB, Amrita and so on
>   3. generate PDF from the substituted SVG.
>       (See [ruby-talk:225127])
>
>

You can also use MasterView to generate xml (for SVG or to use with XSL-FO).
We don't have any special directives for this purpose but many of the
standard ones would work nicely.

In the java world we would use xsl-fo and an FO processor like Apache FOP to
generate PDF's. A low tech way to do this would be to have ruby shell out
and launch FOP to convert the XSL-FO formatted xml to PDF.

I don't know if there are other C/C++ libraries (commercial or otherwise)
that could do the same thing.

Jeff Barczewski
MasterView Template engine project founder
http://masterview.org/
http://rubyforge.org/projects/masterview

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