File: README — Documentation for ezprint (1.0.1)

Ezprint

Ezprint is a drop in replacement for the princely plugin. It uses PDFKit as the backend instead of princexml, possibly saving you millions of dollars. I recommend using the Rack middleware component of PDFKit to print PDFs in rails, but this plugin makes an easy transition from prince->PDFKit for those using princely.

Installation

Version 1.0.0 deprecates support for Rails 2. For Rails 2.x support, install an earlier version.

gem ‘ezprint’ then run “bundle install”

Example

The examples here are similar to princely, since the plugin is basically a reworking of the princely source

class PDFExample < ApplicationController

def show
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.pdf do
      render :pdf => "My Awesome PDF",
             :template => "controller/action.pdf.erb",
             :stylesheets => ["application","print"]
             :layout => "pdf"
    end
  end
end

# Alternatively, you can use make_and_send_pdf to
# render out a PDF for the action without a
# respond_to block.
def pdf
  make_and_send_pdf("file_name")
end

end

Render Defaults

The defaults for the render options are as follows:

layout: false template: the template for the current controller/action stylesheets: none

Using another PDF processor

While ezprint has been designed with PDFKit in mind, other PDF processors such as princexml can be used. A princexml processor is included and can be used by setting Ezprint.processor = :prince in an initializer.

It’s also easy to create your own processor:

module Ezprint

module Processors
  class MyProcessor < Base
    def self.process(html_string, options = {})
      # Code to return a PDF string from an html string here.
    end
  end
end

end

Possible Gotchas

If you’re getting a “Broken Pipe” error when rendering PDF documents, you may need to install the wkhtmltopdf-binary gem or put it in your Gemfile.

Credits

Michael Bleigh for writing the awesome princely plugin, which most of the code is reworked from.

Resources