# Rdoc -\> pdf **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [September 28, 2006, 7:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rdoc-pdf/70386 "2006-09-28T19:49:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mariano\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/eada6e/32.png) [@Mariano\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mariano_K)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2006, 7:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rdoc-pdf/70386/1 "2006-09-28T19:49:10Z")
Hi, I found the below quoted message when searching for a pdf output formatter for rdoc. Any idea if there has been progress made? Cheers, Mariano From: Gregory B. Date: Thurs, Dec 15 2005 11:35 pm On 12/15/05, Austin Z. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > The Pickaxe2 has a PDF version available for purchase from the > Pragmatic Bookshelf. On the other hand, if someone wants to make a > RDoc formatter using PDF::Writer, I’ll try to provide what assistance > I can. Ugh. This sounds like something that may need to go into Ruport. I hate when that happens! Would people be interesting in being able to use rdoc formatting to generate PDFs using Ruby Reports? If so… i’ll put it on the dogpile of features to be added this winter when I’m working full time on Ruport for a couple weeks. ---
**Author:** ![Mariano\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/eada6e/32.png) [@Mariano\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mariano_K)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2006, 10:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rdoc-pdf/70386/2 "2006-09-28T22:15:42Z")
I reformatted your post a tiny bit, to make it eaier to respond to… hope you don’t mind… On 9/28/06, Mariano K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Hi, > > I found the below quoted message when searching for a pdf output > formatter for rdoc. > Would people be interesting in being able to use rdoc formatting to > generate PDFs using Ruby Reports? If so… i’ll put it on the dogpile > of features to be added this winter when I’m working full time on > Ruport for a couple weeks. Wow, this is an old message! We’ve completely rewritten Ruport since then. 🙂 > Any idea if there has been progress made? We didn’t get a roaring response of Yes! to this, so it went back the burner and actually slowly fell off the radar. At this point, we’re all pretty much incredibly busy with other things in Ruport, so I can’t promise that we’ll get to this feature in the forseeable future. However, what we can offer is support for anyone interested in doing this. I’ve used htmldoc to convert html to pdf, and it’d be cool if we can get something more robust into Ruport. It might be better to attack it from the HTML to PDF direction rather than the rdoc to PDF direction, since it would be more general. (Then one could use textile,markdown,rdoc, whatever, convert to html and ruport could then render to PDF) If anyone wants to take the initiative on something like that, go ahead and catch up with us on the Ruport mailing list([http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org](http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org)) or in #ruport on Freenode. All of our developers are currently tied down, but we can take the time to help get the information out there that would be needed for folks who wanted to build something like this. It’s a neat idea, sorry we never got around to it. -Greg ---
**Author:** ![Mariano\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/eada6e/32.png) [@Mariano\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mariano_K)\ **Post date:** [October 3, 2006, 6:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rdoc-pdf/70386/3 "2006-10-03T18:08:04Z")
Hi Gregory, On Sep 28, 2006, at 10:15 PM, Gregory B. wrote: > I reformatted your post a tiny bit, to make it eaier to respond to… > hope you don’t mind… Nope, not at all 😉 > > > Pragmatic Bookshelf. On the other hand, if someone wants to make a > > > of features to be added this winter when I’m working full time on > > > Ruport for a couple weeks. > > Wow, this is an old message! We’ve completely rewritten Ruport > since then. 🙂 > > > Any idea if there has been progress made? > > We didn’t get a roaring response of Yes! > Well, I would like to have the docs available as pdf for offline use > and because I never really quite got the hang of searching the html > docs efficiently. > […] > However, what we can offer is support for anyone interested in doing > this. I’ve used htmldoc to convert html to pdf, and it’d be cool if > we can get something more robust into Ruport. > But rdoc already provides simple markup as a basis, doesn’t it? Using > html would mean to reverse engineer the semantics from a format that > is already rendered for presentation, wouldn’t it? > It might be better to attack it from the HTML to PDF direction rather > than the rdoc to PDF direction, since it would be more general. (Then > one could use textile,markdown,rdoc, whatever, convert to html and > ruport could then render to PDF) > Not quite sure that I get that. Where exactly comes textile or > markdown into the picture here? > If anyone wants to take the initiative on something like that, go > ahead and catch up with us on the Ruport mailing > list([http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org](http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org)) or > in #ruport on Freenode. All of our developers are currently tied > down, but we can take the time to help get the information out there > that would be needed for folks who wanted to build something like > this. > I think I expected this to be something like a new output format for > rdoc, like xml etc. is today. Your thinking goes along the lines to > build something that works outside of rdoc in ruport, or am I missing > the point here? Cheers, Mariano ---
**Author:** ![Mariano\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/eada6e/32.png) [@Mariano\_K](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Mariano_K)\ **Post date:** [October 4, 2006, 2:29am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rdoc-pdf/70386/4 "2006-10-04T02:29:09Z")
I’ve copied this discussion to the Ruport mailing list, please continue the conversation there. We don’t generally use RubyTalk for discussion about Ruport, both for kindness reasons and because we like to keep an archive of the things we discuss for reference. On 10/3/06, Mariano K. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > html would mean to reverse engineer the semantics from a format that > is already rendered for presentation, wouldn’t it? Yeah, If RDoc had an output format that was easily traversible, or if there was a parser that would create this. (Pure ruby object, YAML, or even XML), then it’d be much easier. Since AFAIK it does not, it’s no different to parse text with RDoc in it than it is text with HTML, except that RDoc _might_ be more simple to render. (Who knows? There is a lot of automatic magic in RDoc that’d be tough to replicate without giving it some thought) > > It might be better to attack it from the HTML to PDF direction rather > > than the rdoc to PDF direction, since it would be more general. (Then > > one could use textile,markdown,rdoc, whatever, convert to html and > > ruport could then render to PDF) > > Not quite sure that I get that. Where exactly comes textile or > > markdown into the picture here? They each also output html. If we had an html-to-anything converter in Ruport, we could then not worry about supporting the individual nuances of textile,markdown,rdoc,etc > the point here? > Yep, if this existed, i’d happily support RDoc → whatever in Ruport. > YAML or XML that I could easily traverse would make it easier to > support arbitrary output formats.