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

Rails 2.x

gem install ezprint in environment.rb config.gem “ezprint”

Rails 3

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

Copyright © 2010 Jason Stewart, released under the MIT license.