On: PDFs in Pure Ruby

[blasdel]

I've been using prawn recently on a project, the only feature I'm missing is the ability to read its own output so I can compose operations independently.

It looks like it would be pretty difficult to add -- prawn is implemented as a clever DSL for writing postscript.

[sandal → blasdel]

Prawn does not write postscript, it writes PDF. Though possibly similar in appearance, two different beasts, for sure.

And actually, we have support for reading arbitrary PDF on edge, expect a release in a few weeks :)

http://github.com/yob/prawn/tree/templates_2010

[randy_parker → sandal]

I use the soon-to-be integrated yob-templates_2010 fork to fill in existing PDF forms. All you have to do is add a ":template => filename" in "pdf = Prawn::Document.new()". You can also supply the template name to the prawn document instance after creating it: "pdf(:template => filename)". (see the prawn forum for details I posted there)