Majestic Sea Creature

Technical Ramblings from Gregory Brown

[ANN] Prawn 0.2.2 Released

Just a quick announcement about the latest Prawn release. Enjoy!

Description

Prawn is a new pure Ruby PDF generation library, with the long term goal of providing a suitable replacement for PDF::Writer. It is being developed under the auspices of the Ruby Mendicant project with copious help from a number of mighty fine contributors.

Features

This list isn’t comprehensive, but Prawn has:

• Elementary text and graphics operations
• Support for built-in Adobe fonts (AFM)
• Support for TTF embedding without the need to generate an AFM file
• Automated page flow and text wrapping, with support for many page sizes
• Basic text kerning support
• Cool ‘bounding box’ concept that eliminates lots of coordinate math
• m17n via UTF-8 text rendering (Auto-conversion of encodings on Ruby 1.9)
• Support for JPEG and PNG image embedding (Including PNG
  Transparencies)
• Growing spec suite (PDF::Reader based), and example set
• Full Support for Ruby 1.9
• Orders of magnitude faster table generation than PDF::Writer

News

This is primarily a bug-fix release, with fixes including:

• Newlines no longer suppressed in text wrapping
• Text wrapping now calculates accumulated width correctly
• Checking for a .ttf extension is now case insensitive
• Document.new is fixed restoring the :skip_encoding and :text_options functionality
• Documentation for Font API was made public

There are few new features in Prawn 0.2.2 that are actually Prawn 0.3 backports. These are included due to popular demand, so enjoy!

Addition of a Document#span() method that allows text to flow within a column and continue at the top of the next page. This is similar to the Prawn 0.1.x bounding box functionality:

Improvements to Document#image()

Document#image() now also returns its image info object, so you can do things like discover the width / height of the rendered image without a separate call to Prawn::Images::PNG or Prawn::Images::JPG.

Install

Via Rubygems:

  gem install prawn

Alternatively, you can clone the git repository and checkout the tag:

  git clone git://github.com/sandal/prawn.git
  git checkout 0.2.2

Resources

• Project page
• API Documentation
• Github
• Mailing List
• Bug Tracker & Wiki
• RubyForge Page
• Prawnto, an unofficial Rails plugin for Prawn

There is also almost always a few people lurking / chatting in #prawn on irc.freenode.net. I am <sandal> there.

Acknowledgements:

I will be putting together a comprehensive acknowledgments page some time before my talk at RubyConf 2008, because there are so many people who have helped me out in the last several months who deserve to be recognized.

Until then, thanks to all who helped out with this release!

Until next time

Please enjoy Prawn and get in touch with suggestions.

PS: There was a silent 0.2.1 release because I forgot to do some stuff, please excuse my mistake.

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