Groff is another ruby pdf generator that doesn’t reinvent the wheel.

It use the always present groff command (on all macs and *nix), and ps2pdf from ghostscript package.

If you load it within rails, you will get a TemplateEngine for free

Some resources to get you started:

• {GitHub Wiki}[http://github.com/guillermo/groff/wikis]
• {GitHub Repo}[http://github.com/guillermo/groff]
• {Conferencia Rails Lighting Talks}[http://isabel.dit.upm.es/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_download/gid,840/Itemid,74/] (WMV)

The recommended way is that you get the gem:

1. add GitHub to your local list of gem sources:
   gem sources -a http://gems.github.com/

1. install the gem:
   gem install guillermo-groff

Just add a simple require to the end of “config/environment.rb”:

gem ‘guillermo-groff’ require ‘groff’

That’s it. Remember to install the gem on all machines that you are
deploying to.

Create a view named index.pdf.groff with these content

.AUTHOR “<%= author = %x(who am i).split(” “).first.capitalize %>” .DOCTYPE LETTER .PRINTSTYLE TYPESET .START .DATE <%= Time.now.strftime “%A, %d %b %Y %H:%M” %> .TO User of Groff .FROM Guillermo Álvarez guillermo@cientifico.net .GREETING Hi Enjoy using groff .CLOSING Bye

Authors:: Guillermo Álvarez <guillermo@cientifico.net>
Thanks:: Willpaginate as I used as scaffold for the template engine and gem