Comments on: What's the best way to programmatically edit a pdf in ruby?

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:46:37 +0000

Check out pdftk for easy merging of PDF documents (it’s a CLI app)

http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

By: mlambie

mlambie — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:01:20 +0000

I had this exact same problem to solve recently, and settled on passing a bunch of JSON out to a PHP service as I wasn’t happy with any of the tools for editing or creating PDFs with Ruby (and Rails).

I needed to write on top of a PDF template and managed to do so with little issue using FPDF and FPDI on PHP. I know it’s not Ruby but it solved my issue in the short term, and might be useful for others.

By: alan

alan — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:15:20 +0000

I forgot to mention, you won’t beat html styling in other libraries, and certain packages (of royal lineage – for example) suck at converting html to pdf.

By: alan

alan — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:11:53 +0000

I’ve dealt with this, and maybe you’ll think this is stupid, but you’ll get the best fidelity out of a print to pdf solution (through cups). There are walkthroughs out there for setting up the cups/pdf print. Anyways, try putting on your mozrepl boots and march through loading up the page to print (as a url), and print. Obviously, this is single user account based, so go ahead and create buttloads of user accounts and a nice dynamic load balancer / queue for pdf gen requests. In the end, you’ll have a beautifully orchestrated telnet directed circus, replete with lions, tigers, and pdfs.

By: ehsanul

ehsanul — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:09:00 +0000

Also, have you tried asking on stack overflow? Ruby IRC chat? Could prove useful.

By: ehsanul

ehsanul — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:08:04 +0000

I’m all for Ruby (it’s my favorite language at the moment). But if you can’t find any good library in ruby for this, then perhaps in this case it would be a good idea to look elsewhere.

By: John McCaffrey

John McCaffrey — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:28:40 +0000

I’ll have to check this out, it seems like being deeply familiar with iText, and being able to create good docs from any programming stack would be good for me anyway as this is something that comes up on every project no matter if its Java, Rails, .Net or PHP. Thanks for the tip (I’ll have to find that article and contact the author)

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ’0 which is not a hashcash value.

By: John McCaffrey

John McCaffrey — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:26:10 +0000

I’ve heard good things about princexml, and the ruby wrappers for it, but I balked at the price, given the pdf requirements that I was aware of at the time I was making my selection. I think if the reports I’m generating need to go beyond the formatting I’m able to get with Prawn now, I’m going to start looking into princeXml and seeing what it can do. (do you have any issue with the pricing when running in production, or is all your stuff on a single ‘server’ anyway? – I guess I could say its on a single physical server, independent of how many VMs are running in the cluster/cloud)

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ’0 which is not a hashcash value.

By: MattR

MattR — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:09:56 +0000

Pragmatic Programmers uses iText to create the personalised stamps on the PDF versions of their books. (From the article in PragPub it looks as if this is done as an edit to an existing PDF master copy, too.)

It’s a fairly short article (no technical details), but it may be worth contacting them for more info to see if it could suit your needs.

By: George Anderson

George Anderson — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:54:43 +0000

Have you looked at http://www.princexml.com/ ? It’s been bullet-proof for me, but may be overkill for your needs.