Prawn
Create PDFs with Ruby

Tom Klaasen
• Co-founder of (http://10to1.be)
• @tomklaasen
• http://tomklaasen.net

Prawn
• Prawn takes the pain out of generating
beautiful printable documents, while still
remaining fast, tiny and nimble.

History
• Gregory Brown: “What if I could just do
open source for a while, non-
commercially?”
• http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2008/03/
id_love_to_quit_my_job_sort_of.html

Goals
• The features you need, without all the
complexity
• Built in support for UTF-8
• Easy image embedding
• Flexible table drawing
• Simplified content positioning

Code Examples

“Hello, World”

Render a book

Render a book (2)

Render a book (3)
• PDF: 84 pages
• “Took 6.582318 to generate.”

Tables

Tables (2)

Bounding boxes

Bounding boxes (2)

The Future
• Now: alpha
• Project is gaining traction quickly
• First stable production release: June 2009

How to get it
• gem install prawn

References
• http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/
• http://advent2008.hackruby.com/past/
2008/12/17/
awn_and_the_future_of_ruby_pdf_generat
ion

Thank You
• tom@10to1.be
• @tomklaasen
• http://tomklaasen.net