Graphic Designers : Prawn needs a logo!

[Gregory Brown]

Hi folks,

I'll be releasing an alpha version of Prawn[0], the fast, nimble PDF
library for Ruby within the next few days. However, despite the
awesome name of this library, I am lacking an awesome logo!

If you have good graphic design skills, think of it as your
contribution to the Ruby Mendicant project[1], and help me fulfill
this highly important dream of having a beautiful Prawn logo.

If you are interested in submitting something, post candidate logos to
http://groups.google.com/group/prawn-ruby before August 1st, 2008. I
am asking that all submissions be under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license[2].

If I decide to use your logo, I'll attribute you wherever it is used
and display a text link to whatever you want (within reason).

Let the Logo Prawntest begin!

-greg

[0] http://github.com/sandal/prawn
[1] http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2008/03/the_ruby_mendicant_project.html
[2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 

[Thomas Volkmar Worm]

Hello Gregory,

I'll be releasing an alpha version of Prawn[0], the fast, nimble PDF
library for Ruby within the next few days.

Great!! I was looking for a PDF library a couple of weeks ago, but could
not find something suitable. Do you have a homepage for Prawn[0], where I
could find some information about the lib? The links you put at the end
of your post seemed not so informative to me or I am just not finding the
right places.

Back to the problem I had: All libraries I found could produce PDFs, but
not read them. What I wanted to do was just to personalize an existing
PDF before delivery, which could not be done by the libs, I found.
Fortunately there was CPAN, which provides a couple of solutions for any
problem and I wrote a little perl script, which I called from ruby in my
rails app.

Another part of the job was prepareing the PDFs, which I did in perl,
since I still had the scripts from the year before: Merging pages from
PDFs I got and providing them with bookmarks.

So what I am interested about is, whether I could solve such problems
(manipulating/reusing existing PDFs) in ruby in the near future ;-)


Happy coding

Thomas

 

[Gregory Brown]

Hello Gregory,

I'll be releasing an alpha version ofPrawn[0], the fast, nimble PDF
library for Ruby within the next few days.

Great!! I was looking for a PDF library a couple of weeks ago, but could
not find something suitable. Do you have a homepage forPrawn[0], where I
could find some information about the lib? The links you put at the end
of your post seemed not so informative to me or I am just not finding the
right places.

No homepage just yet, the code hasn't even been released yet.

There are lots of examples in the examples/ dir but they are mostly
feature tests, not samples of 'real' PDFs.

I'll include some of that stuff in the first release, due out in a few
days.

Back to the problem I had: All libraries I found could produce PDFs, but
not read them. What I wanted to do was just to personalize an existing
PDF before delivery, which could not be done by the libs, I found.
Fortunately there was CPAN, which provides a couple of solutions for any
problem and I wrote a little perl script, which I called from ruby in my
rails app.

This is currently the recommended approach to those who've been asking
this question on the PDF::Writer mailing list.

So what I am interested about is, whether I could solve such problems
(manipulating/reusing existing PDFs) in ruby in the near future ;-)

Our longterm goal is that Prawn and PDF::Reader join together under
the 'Ruby PDF Project'. I've also seen some effort being put into
something that reads in a PDF and generates a PDF::Writer object. I
hope that if that approach works, it can be done for Prawn as well.

But in short, this isn't likely to happen in the 'near' future, unless
others develop the features. It may well happen eventually though.

The first Prawn releases will be developer snapshots, meant to help
uncover bugs and figure out what additional features are needed.
Expect something fairly solid by mid-september.

-greg