Prawn VS HexaPDF

Compare Prawn vs HexaPDF and see what are their differences.

Prawn

Fast, Nimble PDF Writer for Ruby (by prawnpdf)

HexaPDF

Versatile PDF creation and manipulation for Ruby (by gettalong)
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Prawn HexaPDF
10 26
4,593 1,176
0.8% -
7.9 9.3
10 days ago 5 days ago
Ruby Ruby
CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Strongly Reciprocal AGPL-3.0, Nonstandard
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Prawn

Posts with mentions or reviews of Prawn. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-21.
  • Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Mar 2024
    I'm a little confused by your comment. I've been using the Prawn library to generate PDFs on the backend for a side project I am working on for quite sometime https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn

    (Admittedly, the PDFs I generate are most certainly not beautiful, so maybe that's the difference)

  • Working with PDFs in Ruby
    4 projects | dev.to | 24 Oct 2023
    to view the email preview (note the PDF attachment included in the email): ![Email preview with attachment](https://www.honeybadger.io/images/blog/posts/ruby-pdfs/email-preview.png) ## Prawn PDF [Prawn PDF](https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn) is a pure Ruby PDF- generation library that comes packed with features, such as PNG and JPG image embeds, generated file encryption, right-to-left text rendering, a way to incorporate outlines for easy document navigation, and a lot more. Prawn comes with its own DSL, which drives its powerful PDF generation abilities. ### When to Use Prawn Although it's not a fully featured report generation library like the well-known [Jasper Reports](https://community.jaspersoft.com/), with a bit of work using it's powerful DSL, you can generate some really cool and rather complex PDF documents with Prawn. Even so, it's important to note that Prawn isn't everything. If you want to generate PDFs from HTML, then you should look elsewhere, as the gem provides very limited support for inline styling, something of a hurdle if you're working with rich HTML documents. ### Installing and Using Prawn To get started with Prawn, install it with this command: ```bash gem install prawn
  • Need help
    2 projects | /r/rails | 18 May 2023
    Is the Prawn gem something you can utilize?
  • Invoicing gem implementation
    2 projects | /r/rubyonrails | 24 Mar 2022
    Prawn pdf: https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn
  • Working on Script to auto-generate templates, help needed
    4 projects | /r/Onyx_Boox | 13 Jan 2022
    Javascript isn't really my thing, so first I had a go with the Prawn library in ruby, but now I'm hacking LuaTex via Fennel and having a blast.
  • Creating PDFs in a Ruby on Rails application
    6 projects | dev.to | 26 Oct 2021
    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.
  • What libraries do you miss from other languages?
    29 projects | /r/rust | 11 Sep 2021
    On this note, Ruby’s Prawn is great at the writing half and I miss it in pretty much every other language.

HexaPDF

Posts with mentions or reviews of HexaPDF. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-31.
  • Question about Yard
    2 projects | /r/ruby | 31 May 2023
    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 Extras - Additional functionality for the HexaPDF library
    2 projects | /r/ruby | 7 Aug 2022
    I have just released my new gem hexapdf-extras which provides additional functionality on top of the HexaPDF library.
  • Understanding Text in PDF
    2 projects | /r/pdf | 29 Jul 2022
    Regarding TrueType font support: What I meant was that the library isn't a full TrueType font library but contains just the parts necessary for PDF supports. So what it can do is write a subset of a TrueType file because that's needed. But it can't serialize any arbitrary TrueType tables and it only handles those TrueType tables needed for displaying text in PDF. More advanced things like glyph positioning based on the language and characters in question is also not supported but may be in the future. Have a look at https://github.com/gettalong/hexapdf/tree/master/lib/hexapdf/font/true_type/ to see the implementation. All the things in this folder and below should be independent of PDF.
    2 projects | /r/pdf | 29 Jul 2022
    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.
  • What do you use ruby for?
    5 projects | /r/ruby | 4 Jul 2022
    for all my PDF processing needs, courtesy of HexaPDF,
  • One Class/Module per File Rules - Working With Nested Modules
    3 projects | /r/ruby | 27 Jan 2022
    Break the "rules" if need be. There is no need to separate out small classes into their own file because "something says so". If one were to look for the file of such a class, they would see there isn't one and automatically look into the file of the parent module/class. See e.g. https://github.com/gettalong/hexapdf/blob/master/lib/hexapdf/type/annotation.rb
  • [WIP] Creating Digital Signatures for PDFs with HexaPDF
    3 projects | /r/ruby | 14 Dec 2021
    I'm currently in the process of adding support for digital signatures to HexaPDF.
    3 projects | /r/ruby | 14 Dec 2021
    The code for all this is in the devel branch if you want to try it out.
  • Free / low cost software to remove a page from PDF on Windows 10?
    2 projects | /r/pdf | 6 Nov 2021
    There are a variety of command line tools like HexaPDF and qpdf that can do this; however, they need to be used on the command line.
  • Hooking into RDoc for better documentation with automatically executed examples
    2 projects | /r/ruby | 21 Oct 2021
    After I got some feedback about missing examples in the API documentation of HexaPDF, I decided to do something about it.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Prawn and HexaPDF you can also consider the following projects:

Wicked Pdf - PDF generator (from HTML) plugin for Ruby on Rails

Pdfkit - A Ruby gem to transform HTML + CSS into PDFs using the command-line utility wkhtmltopdf

Grover - A Ruby gem to transform HTML into PDFs, PNGs or JPEGs using Google Puppeteer/Chromium

CombinePDF - A Pure ruby library to merge PDF files, number pages and maybe more...

Squid - A Ruby library to plot charts in PDF files

Shrimp - a phantomjs based pdf renderer

RGhost - RGhost is a document creation and conversion API. It uses the Ghostscript framework for the format conversion, utilizes EPS templates and is optimized to work with larger documents. Support(PDF,PS,GIF,TIF,PNG,JPG,etc)