# Prawn 0.2 - Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generation

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/prawn-0-2-fast-nimble-ruby-pdf-generation/148509>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [September 13, 2008, 9:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/prawn-0-2-fast-nimble-ruby-pdf-generation/148509 "2008-09-13T21:16:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/e47774/32.png) [@naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/naething)\
**Post date:** [September 13, 2008, 9:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/prawn-0-2-fast-nimble-ruby-pdf-generation/148509/1 "2008-09-13T21:16:48Z")

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Prawn : Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generator  
Release Version 0.1.0

= Description:

Prawn is a new pure Ruby PDF generation library, with the long term  
goal of providing a suitable replacement for PDF::Writer. It is being  
developed under the auspices of the Ruby Mendicant project with  
copious help from a number of mighty fine contributors.

= Features:

This list isn’t comprehensive, but Prawn has:

- Elementary text and graphics operations
- Support for built-in Adobe fonts (AFM)
- Support for TTF embedding without the need to generate an AFM file
- Automated page flow and text wrapping, with support for many page  
sizes
- Basic text kerning support
- Cool ‘bounding box’ concept that eliminates lots of coordinate math
- m17n via UTF-8 text rendering (Auto-conversion of encodings on Ruby  
1.9)
- Support for JPEG and PNG image embedding (Including PNG  
Transparencies)
- Growing spec suite (PDF::Reader based), and example set
- Full Support for Ruby 1.9
- Orders of magnitude faster than PDF::Writer for table generation

= News:

This is the second major release of Prawn and includes many new  
features and bug fixes. You can find a full release summary on my  
blog at:

[http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/archives/2008.09/prawn\_0\_2.html](http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/archives/2008.09/prawn_0_2.html)

= Install:

gem install prawn

Alternatively, you can clone the git repository with:

git clone git://github.com/sandal/prawn.git

= Resources:

- Project webpage with basic overview and some examples / sample PDFs:  
[http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com](http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com)

- API Documentation:  
[http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/docs/](http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/docs/)

- Github  
[GitHub - practicingruby/prawn: THIS REPOSITORY HAS MOVED TO:](http://github.com/sandal/prawn)

- Mailing List  
[http://groups.google.com/group/prawn-ruby](http://groups.google.com/group/prawn-ruby)

- Bug Tracker / Wiki:  
[http://prawn.lighthouseapp.com](http://prawn.lighthouseapp.com)

- RubyForge Page:  
[http://rubyforge.org/projects/prawn](http://rubyforge.org/projects/prawn)

- Prawnto, an unofficial Rails plugin for Prawn:  
[http://cracklabs.com/prawnto](http://cracklabs.com/prawnto)

There is also almost always a few people lurking / chatting in #prawn  
on [irc.freenode.net](http://irc.freenode.net). I am there.

= Acknowledgements:

I will be putting together a comprehensive acknowledgments page some  
time before the end of the Ruby Mendicant project, because there are  
so many people who have helped me out in the last several months.

Thanks to all who helped out with this release!

= Until next time

Please enjoy Prawn and get in touch with suggestions!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/e47774/32.png) [@naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/naething)\
**Post date:** [September 13, 2008, 9:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/prawn-0-2-fast-nimble-ruby-pdf-generation/148509/2 "2008-09-13T21:17:23Z")

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On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Gregory B.  
[removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> Prawn : Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generator  
> Release Version 0.1.0

Err… 0.2.0 :-/