Can anybody show me (maybe copy/paste a simple code example) how to create the .pdf file from an existing (.xls) file, using the Prawn gem? (Basically, I'd need the command that "opens" the existing file.)
(I'm asking because the Prawn documentation (http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/docs/) seems to be gone since quite a while - it's not even usable via Google cache...)
Thanks a lot for any help with this!
Tom
I'd suggest that you break the problem down.
Can you read xls with Ruby? Possibly, but it's flaky at best. However, you can easily read csv, and xls exports nicely to that format.
Can you write a 'table' of values to a prawn pdf? Yes
So, (almost) all you need is a little program that can parse a csv file into a prawn-friendly table-structure and then hand it off to Prawn for generation.
Turns out the Prawn gem cannot handle existing files...
Prawn can be used to render content on top of a PDF. You're talking about .xls, a completely different format.
Related
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
I've been using the awesome prawn gem in my last few project, but this time I have to covert a odt file (in odf format) to PDF.
I know that there are many gems that can do this, for example docsplit and others, but since I am already using prawn to generate other PDFs in the same app I would really like to know if I could get a way without adding yet another pdf creator type gem...
Does anyone know any resources that could help? Or at least a (really) simple gem that coverts odt to PDF (without possibly having to install anything)?
Thanks in advance...
No, Prawn can't do that. Prawn is just a library for programmatically generating PDF documents.
Best way would be using LibreOffice in a head-less fashion to convert ODF files into 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.
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!
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