HexaPDF VS Wicked Pdf

An example for a very simple setup is the cmdparse gem documentation. It only has a few additional documentation files that accompany the main API documentation. The other end of the spectrum is the documentation for HexaPDF which encompasses many additional documentation files besides the API documentation and deeply integrates the API docs into the whole documentation website.

HexaPDF is a Ruby OSS library with a commercial version available and profitable.

So I'm collecting feature ideas for that table implementation at https://github.com/gettalong/hexapdf/discussions/231.

Hi there! I'm the author of HexaPDF.

git clone https://github.com/gettalong/hexapdf.git

You can use this HexaPDF script to do this:

I have just released my new gem hexapdf-extras which provides additional functionality on top of the HexaPDF library.

You can use HexaPDF together with a small script to do this (see the third line on how to use the script):

TrueType subsetting mainly consists of generating the necessary glyph and various index tables, and copying over all the other necessary tables which don't need to be adjusted. See https://github.com/gettalong/hexapdf/blob/master/lib/hexapdf/font/true_type/subsetter.rb for what is needed to subset.

for all my PDF processing needs, courtesy of HexaPDF,

My first contact with building PDFs was with rails using https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf. The task always seems easy, you just build HTML and render that to pdf. And in fact, the part of rendering the info to the pdf is easy. The nightmare comes when implementing what is on the mockups. How will CSS behave in printing mode? What if we have a component that can’t split on a page break, it should jump in its entirety to the next page? What if our cover page does not count to the page total? What if the cover page does not have an header/footer? Why is the pdf so big?

We’ll start with the WickedPDF gem, which is powered by the wkhtmltopdf command-line library.

You have a few options when trying to create a PDF in a Rails environment. Prawn and Wicked PDF have been around for quite a while. I have been using both gems and they work fine. However, they have a few limitations that can make it difficult to handle more complex PDFs. I recently discovered Grover, which can remediate some of this inflexibility in creating PDFs.

# WickedPDF Global Configuration # # Use this to set up shared configuration options for your entire application. # Any of the configuration options shown here can also be applied to single # models by passing arguments to the `render :pdf` call. # # To learn more, check out the README: # # https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf/blob/master/README.md WickedPdf.config ||= {} WickedPdf.config.merge!({ layout: "pdf.html.erb", orientation: "Landscape", lowquality: true, zoom: 1, dpi: 75 })

A couple of popular gems to convert HTML to PDF in Rails are PDFKit and WickedPDF. They both use a command line utility called wkhtmltopdf under the hood; which uses WebKit to render a PDF from HTML.

Thanks for sharing - it takes a lot to share these sort of personal experiences. I've definitely been there, too.

Aside from all the good and valid comments about reducing scope and shipping an MVP, I'd like to raise another point which may be controversial (or even wrong), but still worth raising:

Would it have been different if you had used Rails? A few of the problems you mention (rich text editing, validation, and to some extend, pdf exports) are very easily solved in Rails. Take rich text editing: It's literally a couple minutes to use ActionText. Or validations / forms, there's really not much work to do. PDF exports are also not too hard via wicked_pdf [1] if you're okay with fixing some formatting quirks later on.

I've seen both worlds by writing tons of JS / React code myself, and at that time (2016-2018) those problems were almost an order of magnitude more time-costly to implement in SPAs. I remember react-router.. not great memories.

Of course, all the points reducing MVP scope still hold, yadda yadda, but.. if you could have had all those features (nearly) for free, would you be at another stage now? Who knows.

[1] https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf