Rails: Convert HTML to PDF? [closed]

Answer 1

After After a lot of blood sweat and tears I managed to write a pretty simple rails app that allows the user to write letter templates via TinyMce, these are then saved and can be viewed as pdf documents.

I decided to restrict the options in the wysiwyg editor as much as possible as some of the options don't work exactly as expected, but that's nothing a little gsub-ing couldn't solve if needed.

There is a ruby gem that wraps HTMLDOC which you'll need: PDF::HTMLDoc

Once you've got that, register the mime type, then you can do something like:

@letter_template = LetterTemplate.find(params[:id])

respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.pdf { send_data render_to_pdf({:action => 'show.rpdf',  :layout => 'pdf_report'}), :filename => @letter_template.name + ".pdf",  :disposition => 'inline' }
    end

In the application controller i've added the render_to_pdf method like:

def render_to_pdf(options =nil)
    data = render_to_string(options)
    pdf = PDF::HTMLDoc.new
    pdf.set_option :bodycolor, :white
    pdf.set_option :toc, false
    pdf.set_option :portrait, true
    pdf.set_option :links, false
    pdf.set_option :webpage, true
    pdf.set_option :left, '2cm'
    pdf.set_option :right, '2cm'
    pdf.set_option :footer, "../"
    pdf.set_option :header, "..."
    pdf.set_option :bottom, '2cm'
    pdf.set_option :top, '2cm'
    pdf << data
    pdf.generate
  end

You'll find more documentation on HTMLDOC site that Travis Beale Linked to. Hope this helps get you on your way and unless your documents are really complicated it should suffice. Let us know how you get on.

Answer 2

I am trying the library from www.pd4ml.com

here is a code snip....

I pull in the html into the String content. Then I do a couple things like replace the radio buttons with checkboxes and then run it through the pd4ml library to render the pdf.
The result looks pretty much like the original page....

    String content = nextPage.generateResponse().contentString();

    content = content.replace("Print", "");
    content = content.replace("Back", "");

    content = content.replace("border=\"1\"", "border=\"0\"");
    content = content.replace("radio", "checkbox");

    java.net.InetAddress i = java.net.InetAddress.getLocalHost();
    String address =  i.getHostAddress()+":53000";

    content = content.replace("img src=\"/cgi-bin", "img src=\"http://"+address+"/cgi-bin");

    System.out.println(content);

    PD4ML html = new PD4ML();
    html.setPageSize( new java.awt.Dimension(650, 700) );
    html.setPageInsets( new java.awt.Insets(30, 30, 30, 30) );
    html.setHtmlWidth( 750 );
    html.enableImgSplit( false );
    html.enableTableBreaks(true);

    StringReader isr = new StringReader(content);
    baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    html.render( isr, baos);
    PDFRegForm pdfForm = (PDFRegForm)pageWithName("PDFRegForm");
    pdfForm.baos = baos;
    pdfForm.generateResponse();

Answer 3

The greatest thing nowaday is PDFKit for this job:

• https://github.com/pdfkit/PDFKit
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/220-pdfkit