rendering pdf

[twittwit]

hello all,

i am new to ruby ( like two hours new! ) but i do know other
languages. I LOVE RUBY!

anyway, i want to code something to render my website into pdf. i have
seen these railscasts :
http://railscasts.com/episodes/153-pdfs-with-prawn
http://railscasts.com/episodes/78-generating-pdf-documents

they are super good but it seems that they are taking the elements and
reconstruct them into pdf. I wonder is there something that can
duplicate the webpage as it is ? ( ie, the entire layout will remain
the same as what is seem the webpage and the only difference is that
it is no longer html but pdf.)

if not, can someone enlighten me how i should approach this?


thank you all!

bryan

 

[Gregory Brown]

they are super good but it seems that they are taking the elements and
reconstruct them into pdf. =A0I wonder is there something that can
duplicate =A0the webpage as it is ? ( ie, the entire layout will remain
the same as what is seem the webpage and the only difference is that
it is no longer html but pdf.)

If it's possible to use JRuby, look into FlyingSaucer.

-greg

 

[Brian Candler]

Google "ruby html to pdf" gives these in the first few hits:

http://sublog.subimage.com/2007/05/29/html-css-to-pdf-using-ruby-on-rails
(prince - commercial)

http://blog.adsdevshop.com/2007/11/20/easy-pdf-generation-with-ruby-rails-and-htmldoc/
(htmldoc)

http://jimneath.org/2009/02/16/creating-pdf-documents-in-ruby-on-rails/
(prince again, but the comments have some other suggestions)

Also, I had a vague idea there were Ruby bindings for at least one of
the HTML rendering libraries out there - a quick search for "ruby gecko"
turns up a project, but doesn't look like it has changed since 2005.

 

[Brian Candler]

I just came across another free (GPL) option for rendering HTML+CSS to
PDF: http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/

It's written in Python but apaprently can be invoked via the shell.