PDF Creation Best Practise

Rails
#1

Hi there,

I’m looking for a powerful pdf creation libary. I already tried:

prawn - Nice handling but way too slow when lots of tables are
involved
PDFKit - too slow

Actually I’m trying prince with xml input. It’s pretty fast but I
don’t like the page-break control.

I need a libary which can create pdf’s with up to 90 pages with lots
of nested tables.

Does anyone have an idea?

Regards

#2

I have used LaTeX with embedded ERB to generate 90+ page reports with
quite
a few tables (not nested though) in the past. This was used in a batch
job
that ran via Cron though, not in an interactive browser/user session.

LaTeX can be a bit daunting for a novice user and you will have to do a
lot
of ‘micromanagement’ to get the design looking like you want it (and not
how LaTeX thinks it should look by default)

#3

Hi Farrel,

ran into Latex too. Trying to work out some basic files at the moment.
Do you know a good tutorial which includes rails usage?

Thanks in advance

#4

Not in usage with Rails directly. I’ve had to hack a messy API to
generate
PDF documents from an ERB template. There might be some better publicly
available Ruby/LaTeX APIs out there I did this a few years ago.

Farrel

#5

How about prawn.

#6

Hi,Sönke Buhr

Sorry for that i am a newer for the rails that i dont know how to help
you.

But i have the problem on generating the pdf, i try prawn and
PDFKit.both are unsuccessful, could you show me your steps you set up
the prawn or PDFKit?

Thanks

Daisy

#7

It’s not a library, but I’m part of a project which provides a web api
for compiling LaTeX documents. You can find out a bit more at
http://clsi.scribtex.com (and if you want to run your own service, the
code is available at https://github.com/scribtex/clsi ). The idea is
that you can send a simple request with the content of your LaTeX
document and some options, and the service will return you the pdf and
log files. We’re just starting to switch to offering this as a stable
service, so send me an email if you’d like to know more or give it a
try.