Wicked Pdf VS Prawn

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

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)

to view the email preview (note the PDF attachment included in the email):  ## 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

Is the Prawn gem something you can utilize?

Prawn pdf: https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn

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.

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.

On this note, Ruby’s Prawn is great at the writing half and I miss it in pretty much every other language.

are you using keynote to make the file and then export to pdf? I wonder if it could be possible to do this programatically, using ruby and prawn (https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn) 🤔. I have zero time to try it today, but this could be a fun weekend project for sure.