After several Google searches, it appears that the way to create PDFs in Rails from HTML and CSS (versus a new markup language) is to use Prince.
With licensing at $3800 for my non-big-commercial app, I'm wondering if this is, in fact, consensus or people have an alternative they can share the whats and hows.
You may check out prawn too. Tutorial can be found on railscasts.com.
This may fit the bill: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
We tried tow solutions:
using latex generate pdf, there is ruby gem code rtex
using java library iText, use it you may need rjb which allow you using java lib directly in ruby code, just like jruby, but you don't need build all you application on jruby.
I create tons of different PDF files on the fly from various data sources using Rails, including finest layout. I create need to create them for presenting products to customers.
After having tried all the tools mentioned above, Prince is the best tool for this task.
Prince's rendering quality & CSS support (better than some browsers) is its main selling point. If you're only generating documents with simple layouts, stick with Prawn.
Related
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
I have been doing UI research and have come across admin templates at http://themeforest.net/. I was wondering how do you apply these onto a web app built on Rails. These templates look very similar to wordpress themes. Are they that easy to configure? Is it just as simple as setting up a link to the database to make the fields form capture data? I've been looking at this theme.
For admin templates I recommend using Active Admin. It's relatively easy to implement and gives you great admin screens with little effort.
Yes, You can. I'm trying to solve the same problem and so far I have a couple options:
1.) do it by hand, I've done this before, it works but takes a lot of time to truly understand how your theme is put together. First I would recommend using the included themes assets exactly as they are bundled with the theme. Don't assume that just because you have twitter-bootstrap-rails gem that the bootstrap classes in the theme will work. Link the assets statically and slowly extract out the static assets and replace them in the asset pipeline once you know they work.
2.) Use the strategy suggested in the install_theme gem (http://drnicwilliams.com/2009/10/06/install-any-html-themetemplate-into-your-rails-app/) the gem itself is not maintained any longer (i'm not sure about any forks), but the strategy is sound. Extract the core parts of the template into partials.
The short answer is yes, but there is no straight forward way to "import to rails"
is there a way to generate pdf documents from latex in rails 3? We've been using rtex (http://rtex.rubyforge.org/) in a rails 2 application, however it doesen't seem to work with rails 3.
Our rails application generates invoices using a latex template which we also use to create invoices by hand. Hence we would have to maintain two templates if we had to find a different solution for the pdf generation in rails 3.
Best I found to do such things was to create the .tex files on the server, then call a rake task that ran a "pdflatex" system command.
It is pretty poor in performances I guess, but it's designed for a single admin and works fine for me, on my local machine, and I can use the same latex templates for my letters
Old question, but I'm sure this'll help anyone coming to this page now.
Take a look at the rails-latex (LatexToPdf) gem.
The LatexToPdf.generate_pdf method takes in two arguments:
tex content
a configuration hash
...and returns the pdf binary, which you'll have to write to a file.
I suggest reading through the source to if you need to add configuration.
Note that under the hood, the rails-latex gem still depends on a TeX extension (which you'll need to download) to generate the pdf. The default is pdflatex, and I've personally used xelatex.
As of the writing of this answer, this gem is described as a renderer for rails 3; though it now includes support for rails 4 and 5.
Can anyone recommend a way of creating a view where users can upload images to my app through a WYSIWYG editor?
I've tried solving this using CK Editor and Paperclip but am having lots of trouble... Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way.
If someone's done this before I'd really like to know how! I don't have a editor or file storage mechanism preference so fire away...
This is all dependent on the WYSIWYG's file upload API. From there, just build an ImagesController to handle requests from that API, use whatever system (Paperclip is good) to handle those files internally, and you should be good to go. You won't find a plug-and-play solution; you'll have to hand-roll it.
Turns out that, with more targeted Google searching, you can find a preexisting solution. Here's one for TinyMCE and Rails. You may, however, end up finding that it doesn't meet your needs, in which case I would not be surprised to find that creating your own solution would be simpler than you expect :)
You could try Bootsy. It's a WYSIWYG editor with image upload capability. Includes a (rather simple) image manager as well.
https://github.com/volmer/bootsy
There is an other solution for rails out there:
https://github.com/spohlenz/tinymce-rails
You can load it as gem and configure it via a yml file. And it comes with an extra language gem.
I have been using tinyMce_hammer plugin to use tinymce in my rails app... but right now I also want a way for my users to upload photos and insert them into their wysiwyg editor.... is there a simple way to get this done??.. is there any other wysiwyg editor that works with rails and comes with this feature built in??... what do you reccomend?
These two plugins claim to offer it - Rails 2.3 - https://github.com/andreferraro/rails_tiny_mce
Rails 3 - https://github.com/sandipransing/rails_tiny_mce
I don't think there's an easy way to do this in any of the common rich text editors. I usually have a separate section where users can upload photos and then choose from a variety of layout options.
TinyMCE has a couple of commercial image and file management plugins, but they are based on PHP and .Net. However, I haven't seen a Rails version. It's not particularly hard to build your own image manager using a plugin like paperclip and hook into TinyMCE.