From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2009-07-24T01:11:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Is it possible to justify table title using PDF::SimpleTable

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Jim Burgess<jack.zelig@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Use Prawn instead.  PDF::Writer is no longer supported, except for
>> critical bug fixes.
>>
>> http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/
>
> Thanks for that.
> I just downloaded and installed the prawn gem and have spent the past
> hour and a half recreating my table using prawn.
>
> One issue which puts me off using it however, is that there is no way to
> get font_style on a per cell basis within a table.

There are actually three ways to do it:

# may require the 0.5 pre-release, can't remember
table [{ :text => "blah", :font_style => :bold }, "another field"]

and also:

require "prawn/format"
table [[ "<b>foo</b>", "..."]]

Both of these have some issues, but work fine for basic needs.
Patches welcome if you run into problems.

> What does 'no longer supported' actually mean?
> No longer being developed or is there some other compatibility issue to
> consider?

Well, PDF::Writer will never really support UTF-8, the patches to make
it run on Ruby 1.9 that appeared recently only do so in a very basic
level, and there are many subtle oddities / bugs that never got fixed.
 The API is very poor by modern Ruby standards (even if it was great
in its time), and performance is abysmal.   Also, technically speaking
I'm the maintainer of PDF::Writer right now, and my solution to 'fix'
it was to build Prawn, after I did some minor cleanup and bug fixes
that were collecting dust for a couple years.

The only reason PDF::Writer isn't officially dead yet is because Prawn
isn't officially alive yet.  But folks keep on contributing, and I
shave off time where I can.  I'm hoping to have something ready by the
year end.

-greg