How do I add to existing PDF template with Wicked_PDF? - ruby-on-rails

I have an existing PDF template that I'd like to fill out within a Rails application and save to a new PDF. Is there a way to do this using Wicked PDF or is there another tool or gem better suited to the task?

Wicked PDF is used for converting HTML to PDF. Not for filling out existing PDF forms or templates.
A quick google search returned HexaPDF or Origami as potential options for editing PDF files with Ruby.

wicked pdf is not for filling existing pre created pdf. you may need to look at prawn, prawn-form for that. Its DSL based pdf library for ruby and ruby on rails.
A quick search got me into this issue.
please take a look, wicked pdf issues github

Related

Rails - Embed XML in PDF

I need to attach a XML file within a PDF file to be PDF/A3 compliant.
I am using rails and so far I had no issues to generate my PDF (using Prawn gem) and my XML separately but I do not know how to "combine" them.
Any ideas ?
Cheers
We have got similar problem and finally decided to follow the below approach
Generate the pdf file using wkhtmltopdf
Use pdftk (https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-server/) to attach XML file with pdf

Forbid printing on generated PDFs (via prawn + combine_pdf)

I need to take a template (a pdf file) and add elements in it. I used prawn gem to generate a pdf with the elements and combine_pdf gem to combine this prawn pdf and the template. It works fine!
Now I need to add permissions to disable printing options. Prawn has an option for that but if I add it, I can't use combine_pdf to combine my template and this prawn pdf. Prawn can't start with an existing pdf (template system has been removed a long time ago...).
So I'm pretty stuck here, I looked everywhere in the web for a solution but couldn't find anything!
instead of combine_pdf gem you can use pdf-toolkit. it supports templating, combine pdf and set permissions. the manual can be found from here.

Prawn + WickedPDF: Using Prawn on wkhtmltopdf/WickedPDF generated PDF's

I am working on a Rails project with both WickedPDF and Prawn. I am using WickedPDF to convert some HTML into a PDF and then using Prawn to add content to that PDF.
When I add content to an uploaded PDF (one that I do not create), Prawn is able to add content without any issues. When I create a PDF using WickedPDF, Prawn has issues when it adds content to the the new WickedPDF generated PDF. It adds the content, but the content seems to be scaled down... a lot (it's barely visible). If I open that same PDF from another program (Gimp, LibreDraw, etc.) and export as PDF, the new PDF works on Prawn as well. So I'm positive it has something to do with the formatting of the WickedPDF generated PDF's. I need Prawn to edit the PDF's that are being generated by WickedPDF, or to be able to generate PDF's that are editable by Prawn.
I searched for other solutions, and found Prawnto (no longer exists), PDFKit (gem installers did nothing), PDFcrowd (I can't pay for it), and am now running out of ideas. I'll be looking through the wkhtmltopdf source code to see if I can further understand the underlying issue (I doubt it, don't know enough about PDF file structure/formatting), but would be very happy if someone has encountered this and has any other ideas.
EDIT 1: Same results occur after creating a PDF from wkhtmltopdf. The issue is not with WickedPDF but with the library it uses. Still haven't found the cause.
EDIT 2: Another interesting result. The text is not only getting scaled down. I just multiplied the font size of the text that Prawn is inserting by 128 so I could see the text. Turns out it is also being flipped upside-down (about the x-axis). Something sinister is happening.
I've just started looking into PDF generators. On this forum, one post mentions that he had scaling issues while using gems that relied on wkhtmltopdf, but didn't experience the problems if he called that library directly.
Hope this helps! I'll update this answer once I get started if I have the same issue but am able to resolve it. Cheers!

How to generate PDF forms in Ruby-on-Rails

I would like to generate PDF forms with radio buttons and submit buttons in it by using Ruby on Rails. Does anyone know if there is a Gem that can help with this task?
I've looked into
Prawn,
Wicked PDF, and
PDFKit
but they don't seem to have this feature. Currently I am just using Acrobat Pro to create my PDF and insert the form manually but would like to automate this with a Gem if possible.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
EDIT
I just found 2 gems that can help insert radio buttons, check boxes, etc. while generating a PDF in rails: prawn-blank and prawn-forms. It doesn't seem like they are being maintained anymore but they should still be useful. Hope this is useful for others attempting to automate generating interactive PDF files too.
There's also RTeX. That works well if you're willing to translate to LaTeX first. LaTeX is a very good way to store marked-up documents. It just depends on how static each document is.
You can use right-signature to complete your task
https://github.com/rightsignature/rightsignature-api
http://www.gsubbarao.com/2013/03/ruby-rightsignature-api-to-prefill.html

generate PDF from html document in Rails

anyone knows about some gem or app in rails to create pdf docs from html5 and css3 with some client side programming??
Thanks ;)
Thank you for your responses. I need this for a possible project wich will use jquery for box positioning and then, will export the resultant html to pdf. Roughly, ¿is this possible?
PDFKit and WickedPDF for Client side generation, as suggested by Raphael and jcadam
Flying Saucer with JRuby: http://xhtmlrenderer.java.net
Personally, I got more accomplished by using Prawn PDF generator. It's capabilities are much more extensive, IMHO.
Prawn for Ruby PDF generation: https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn
WickedPDF: https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf
I'm using it now and rather like it:
"Wicked PDF uses the shell utility wkhtmltopdf to serve a PDF file to a user from HTML. In other words, rather than dealing with a PDF generation DSL of some sort, you simply write an HTML view as you would normally, then let Wicked take care of the hard stuff."
If you need more control, also check out Prawn: https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn. Though Prawn is not an HTML -> PDF converter and is more useful for creating PDFs from scratch.
I'm using both Prawn and WickedPDF on my current project: WickedPDF to generate 'printable' versions of web pages, and Prawn for generating detailed PDF reports.
I believe the PDFKit gem may be what you're looking for.
https://github.com/pdfkit/PDFKit
There's also IMGKit if you want images instead of PDFs.
https://github.com/csquared/IMGKit

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