Building PDF Document in ruby & rails application using prawn Library
Brief
Before getting started with this tutorial, I would like to thanks Greg and
Prawn team for their awesome work towards ruby and rails community.
Installing prawn (core, layout, format, security)
gem install prawn or
Add following line in rails environment file inside initializer block. config.gem 'prawn' Optionally you can specify version to be used and then run task rake gems:install Generating pdf using rails console ./script/console pdf = Prawn::Document.new It creates new pdf document object. Here you can additionally pass options parameters such as - Prawn::Document.new(:page_size => [11.32, 8.49], :page_layout => :portrait) Prawn::Document.new(A0) Here A0 is page size. Prawn::Document.new(:page_layout => :portrait, :left_margin => 10.mm, # different :right_margin => 1.cm, # units :top_margin => 0.1.dm, # work :bottom_margin => 0.01.m, # well :page_size => 'A4') pdf.text("Prawn Rocks") => 12 pdf.render_file('prawn.pdf') => # Here is output file generated [click]
Now let's go through other goodness of prawn. pdf = Prawn::Document.new('A3') do

1. FONTS [click]
# Specify font to be used or specify path to font file. font "times.ttf" font("/times.ttf")
2. TEXT [click]
text 'Sandip Ransing', :size => 41, :position => :center, :style => :bold
3. STROKE LINE [click]
stroke do rectangle [300,300], 100, 200 end
4. IMAGE [click]
Display Local file system Image image 'sandip.png', :height => 50, :position => :center, :border => 2 Scale Image image 'sandip.png', :scale => 0.5, :position => :left Display Remote image from Internet inside pdf require "open-uri" image open('http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:kTG6gAKrnou2gM:http://www.facebook.com/profile/pic.php?uid=AAAAAQAQrLXvTWfyY2ANjttV8D1c0QAAAAnDHPFJe0pPFR84iIzXPKro&t=1") end
5. LINE BREAKS
movedown(20)
6. TABLE/GRID [click]
data = [ ["Name", {:text => 'Sandip Ransing', :font_style => :bold, :colspan => 4 }], ["Address", {:text => 'SHIVAJINAGAR, PUNE 411005', :colspan => 4 }], ["Landmark",{:text => 'NEAR FC COLLEGE', :colspan => 4 }], ["Mobile","9860648108", {:text => "", :colspan => 3 }], ["Education", {:text => "Bachelor in Computer Engineering", :colspan => 4 }], ["Vehicle", 'Hero Honda',"Reg. No.", {:text => "MH 12 EN 921", :colspan => 3 }], ["Additional", "GDCA", "class", 'First', ""], [{:text => "Areas of Speciality", :font_style => :bold}, {:text => "Ruby, Rails, Radiant, Asterisk, Adhearsion, Geokit, Prawn, ....,...", :font_style => :bold, :colspan => 4}], [{:text => "Website", :colspan => 2},{:text => "www.funonrails.com", :colspan => 3}], [{:text => "Company", :colspan => 2},{:text => "Josh Software", :colspan => 3}] ] table data, :border_style => :grid, #:underline_header :font_size => 10, :horizontal_padding => 6, :vertical_padding => 3, :border_width => 0.7, :column_widths => { 0 => 130, 1 => 100, 2 => 100, 3 => 100, 4 => 80 }, :position => :left, :align => { 0 => :left, 1 => :right, 2 => :left, 3 => :right, 4 => :right }
7. LINKS [click]
link_annotation([200, 200, 500, 40],:Border => [0,0,1], :A => { :Type => :Action, :S => :URI, :URI => Prawn::LiteralString.new("http://twitter.com/sandipransing") } ) link_annotation(([0, 100, 100, 150]), :Border => [0,0,1], :Dest => s"http://funonrails.com")
8. PDF Security [click]
encrypt_document :user_password => 'hello', :owner_password => 'railer', :permissions => { :print_document => false }
9. Prawn Inline Formatting
Prawn-format supports inline text formatting that gives user enough flexibility to use html tags. require 'prawn/format' text 'This is Strong text', :inline_format => true text 'This is bold text \n It should be on newline.', :inline_format => true