Gregory Brown
7/26/2008 7:25:00 PM
On 7?25?, ??2?03?, Thomas Volkmar Worm <t...@s4r.de> wrote:
> Hello Gregory,
>
> Gregory Brown wrote:
> > 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