I have a DSL that renders HTML. If I manually generate HTML in the console, and save it as a view (as an experiment, there's no reason to do this), so that it lives in app/views/manifests as show.pdf.erb, and then I simply render the PDF using Wicked's/Rails built in rendering, everything works great and looks great. Now, because this is dynamic HTML, meaning it can change based on the data, what I have to do is generate the HTML as a string, and then use Wicked's pdf_from_string:
html = HtmlGenerator.parse_node node, "root", #manifest
pdf = WickedPdf.new.pdf_from_string(html) # note, this is the same HTML that looks great as a view
and then send it to the browser
send_data(pdf,
:filename => "my_pdf_name.pdf",
:disposition => 'inline')
Now, everything is screwed up. It appears like the fonts are 15% bigger, all of my rows are screwed up. Does the rendering routine in WickedPDF use a different formatting that pdf_from_string?
Thanks for any help,
Kevin
Related
I'm using https://github.com/pdfkit/pdfkit in rails to generate a PDF.
kit = PDFKit.new(html)
kit.stylesheets << 'app/assets/stylesheets/pdf.css'
kit.to_pdf
The PDF renders properly based on the HTML. I'm just curious how to introduce a fixed footer/header. For instance, if I like to add a page number fixed at the bottom of the page along with a logo on every single page.
Thanks in advance.
I just dug into the gem more and saw the :header_center option.
Looks like I'll be able to pass in value (probably a template as well) when creating the PDF like so.
kit = PDFKit.new(html, :header_center => "foo", :footer_center => "bar")
I want to give export option in my application that will export PDF file and it should consist multi-line graph. How can i do this in ruby on rails.
It depends on your situation, and what content you already have (if any) which you want to render your PDF based on. Some existing options are:
PDFKit, which can create PDFs based on your existing HTML documents
Prawn, which is a lightweight Ruby API for creating PDFs
Some options (like PDFKit above, and also Wicked PDF) will rely on an external tool like wkhtmltopdf to render existing HTML pages as PDFs, whereas other options (like Prawn) are more Ruby native, so it really depends on your situation which path your should take in your application.
As for the graph you mentioned, if you already have it being rendered as an image file, it might be easiest to use one of the HTML-to-PDF generation options, but if you're wanting to render the graph custom in the PDF context and don't already have it as a standalone image, something like Prawn may be best.
In my application, i am using Highcharts.
I have found great success in rendering charts to pdf using a combination of 2 gems:
wicked_pdf - https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf
and
wkhtmltopdf-binary - https://github.com/zakird/wkhtmltopdf_binary_gem
The second is the binary dependency for wicked_pdf.
It can render your rails view in pdf format.
Edit:
I have used PDFkit as well, code is given below from my controller method:
Onclick of "Download PDF" button:
if params[:commit]=="Download PDF"
html = render_to_string(:layout => false , :action => "controller_name/pdf_chart_erb_file.html.erb")
kit = PDFKit.new(html)
kit.stylesheets << "#{Rails.root}/app/assets/stylesheets/application.css"
send_data(kit.to_pdf, :filename => "my_chart.pdf", :type => 'application/pdf', :disposition => 'inline')
file = kit.to_file("#{Rails.root}/app/exe.pdf")
end
You can use or render your graphs in pdf_chart_erb_file.html.erb, it simply converts all your html file to PDF file as per code given above.
I'm generating PDF with the Wicked PDF gem on Ruby on Rails, but have to repeat some HTML content on every page.
What I'm trying is to use just part of the page to my main content, and use HTML to add stuff around it, in every page.
Something like this image (Check)
I tried playing with header, but I wasn't able to put the content in front of the HTML (even using z-index), and was only able to position the main content with margin and spacing vertically (didn't find any options to do it horizontally).
Any ideas? Thanks!
Since no one answered, I will post my solution here. It is not beautiful nor brilliant, it is so so so far from these - but since no one answered, maybe we can start a discussion from it.
I was able to generate a PDF with only the text (but with the correct margins), with no background, using Wicked PDF. Like this image. I used it to just save the file.
This was the code for it:
# Save PDF with only the text (with correct margins)
render :pdf => "text#{id}",
:margin => {:top => "1.6in", :left => "4.1in", :right => "1.2in", :bottom => "2.5in"},
:page_size => "Letter",
:template => "careers/job_pdf_text.pdf.erb",
:save_to_file => Rails.root.join('public/job_pdf_tempfiles', "text#{id}.pdf"),
:save_only => true,
:no_background => true
Then I used RMagick to create images from this saved PDF. The important here is that I saved GIFs with transparent background, and Magick creates one image for each page on the PDF. This was the code to save the images:
# Save images from the only-text PDF
#text_images = []
text_images_magick = Magick::Image.read(Rails.root.join('public/job_pdf_tempfiles', "text#{id}.pdf"))
text_images_magick.each_with_index do |image, index|
file_name = Rails.root.join('app/assets/images/careers_pdf', "text#{id}-#{index}.gif")
image.write(file_name)
#text_images << file_name
end
Ok, so at this moment I have images of the text, like this. Now what I did was put those in an HTML page, in the correct place and then used Wicked PDF again to render the final PDF. I rendered the PDF with margin 0, and for each #text_images I created a container, from which I positioned everything else (including the image itself) to achieve what I wanted in the beggining.
Does anyone have a better idea to share?
I'm writing a service that generates PDF files from a set of XML files. The PDF is being correctly generated. However, everytime I click on the "view PDF" link, the browser asks the user to download the PDF file.
I need the PDF to display inline, just like any regular HTML page. I though I wrote the code right, but something must be missing - the browser keeps asking the user to download.
Here's the current code:
class PdfController < Controller
def generate
# stuff
send_data pdf_bytes, :disposition => 'inline', :type => 'application/pdf'
end
end
Any ideas?
Try removing the Content-Disposition header altogether. It's been my experience that Content-Disposition: attachment works pretty well, but many browsers have inconsistent behavior for any other value. If you want to display inline, it might just be better to remove the header and hope for the best. IE seems to have the most problems with this header. (Surprise, surprise.) Just make sure you're still setting Content-Type: application/pdf.
The other option would be to use an iframe and set the src of the iframe to your PDF file. Almost all browsers that support inline PDF viewing will handle this correctly. The downside is that you might end up displaying a blank iframe whereas non-supported browsers would have otherwise done a graceful fallback to simply downloading the PDF.
I am working on a simple Rails/jQuery HTML templater app which stores a series of pre-designed templates in a database (at the moment I've just saved these as partials to get the basic concept working) and on clicking 'Show code' alongside any one of these template records, a js.erb script should place the corresponding partial within 'pre' tags dynamically via JS on that page so the user can see the raw html code.
At the moment it's working but I get the rendered html coming back and not the raw HTML that I'm looking for. Here's the js:
$("div#template-view").html("<pre><code><%= escape_javascript( render :partial => "core_template") %></code></pre>");
So pray tell, what obvious thing am I missing!? :-)
Thanks
Allan
Use
$("div#template-view").text("...")
instead. This will not parse the code
The pre tag will show source code (or any text) in a reasonable approximation to it's original state, but it won't escape html for you. Unescaped html will always be rendered as html regardless of what tag it happens to be in. By escaped i mean that all the special characters are converted to their escaped versions. The rails method h will do this for you, so if you call h with the results of calling escape_javascript then it should work fine.
$("div#template-view").html("<pre><code><%= h(escape_javascript(render :partial => "core_template")) %></code></pre>");