Hi Folks,
I’m happy to announce that after donations closed, I received a total
of 22 weeks of funding. After inviting the community to participate
in open discussion on the Ruby Mendicant mailing list, as well as
considering the various emails and conversations I’ve been having over
the last few weeks, I’ve decided on the project I’ll work on.
I will spend the next several months building top-notch PDF support
for Ruby. This will be a brand spankin’ new pure Ruby library,
designed to be fast, tiny, and nimble. I plan to support both Ruby
1.8 and 1.9 from the ground up, and will be using PDF::Reader as much
as I can to do some automated testing.
Though this library will aim to eventually replace PDF::Writer, it
will likely be many months before this is possible. In the meantime,
Mike Milner and I will continue to maintain PDF::Writer. I am hoping
that my work on this new library will help me find and fix issues in
PDF::Writer more easily, which means that even if you’re not in a
hurry to try something new, this project may still benefit you.
The name I’ve chosen for the new PDF library is Prawn. Though it may
be a bit quarky, I think you will agree that it will be difficult to
confuse with the Ruby PDF project, and that it also represents one of
the most majestic sea creatures to ever live.
Anyway, that’s the news for now. Please join the Ruby Mendicant
mailing list to keep up to date on project announcements. I won’t be
announcing my planning details to ruby-talk but you’ll catch those
resources on the Mendicant list when they become available.
http://groups.google.com/group/rubymendicant
Thank you so much to those who supported this project through
donations and kind words of support and advice. Please continue to
stay active in the process by getting involved in Prawn when
development starts up around April 15th.
-greg