Wicked PDF uses the shell utility wkhtmltopdf to serve a PDF file to a user from HTML. In other words, rather than dealing with a PDF generation DSL of some sort, you simply write an HTML view as you would normally, and let Wicked take care of the hard stuff.
First, be sure to install wkhtmltopdf. Note that versions before 0.9.0 have problems on some machines with reading/writing to streams. This plugin relies on streams to communicate with wkhtmltopdf.
More information about wkhtmltopdf could be found here.
Next:
script/plugin install git://github.com/lleirborras/wicked_pdf.git
script/generate wicked_pdf
class ThingsController < ApplicationController
def show
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.pdf do
render :pdf => "file_name",
:template => "things/show.pdf.erb", # OPTIONAL
:layout => "pdf.html", # OPTIONAL
:wkhtmltopdf => '/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf', # OPTIONAL, path to binary
:show_as_html => !params[:debug].blank?, #OPTIONAL, maybe you just want to allow debuging in development environment?
:margin => {:top => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:bottom => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:left => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:right => SIZE}, #OPTIONAL
:orientation => 'Landscape or Portrait', #OPTIONAL, default Portrait
:page_size => 'A4, Letter, ...', #OPTIONAL, default A4
:proxy => 'TEXT', #OPTIONAL
:username => 'TEXT', #OPTIONAL
:password => 'TEXT', #OPTIONAL
:cover => 'URL', #OPTIONAL
:dpi => "dpi", #OPTIONAL
:encoding => "TEXT", #OPTIONAL
:user_style_sheet => "URL", #OPTIONAL
:redirect_delay => NUMBER, #OPTIONAL
:zoom => FLOAT, #OPTIONAL
:page_offset => NUMBER, #OPTIONAL
:book => true, #OPTIONAL
:default_header => true, #OPTIONAL
:disable_javascript => true, #OPTIONAL
:greyscale => true, #OPTIONAL
:lowquality => true, #OPTIONAL
:enable_plugins => true, #OPTIONAL
:disable_internal_links => true, #OPTIONAL
:disable_external_links => true, #OPTIONAL
:print_media_type => true, #OPTIONAL
:disable_smart_shrinking => true, #OPTIONAL
:use_xserver => true, #OPTIONAL
:no_background => true, #OPTIONAL
:header => {:html => {:template => "public/header.pdf.erb" OR :url => "www.header.bbb"}, #OPTIONAL
:center => "TEXT", #OPTIONAL
:font_name => "NAME", #OPTIONAL
:font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:left => "TEXT", #OPTIONAL
:right => "TEXT", #OPTIONAL
:spacing => REAL, #OPTIONAL
:line => true}, #OPTIONAL
:footer => {:html => {:template => "public/header.pdf.erb" OR :url => "www.header.bbb"}, #OPTIONAL
:center => "TEXT", #OPTIONAL
:font_name => "NAME", #OPTIONAL
:font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:left => "TEXT", #OPTIONAL
:right => "TEXT", #OPTIONAL
:spacing => REAL, #OPTIONAL
:line => true}, #OPTIONAL
:toc => {:font_name => "NAME", #OPTIONAL
:depth => LEVEL, #OPTIONAL
:header_text => "TEXT", #OPTIONAL
:header_fs => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:l1_font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:l2_font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:l3_font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:l4_font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:l5_font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:l6_font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:l7_font_size => SIZE, #OPTIONAL
:l1_indentation => NUM, #OPTIONAL
:l2_indentation => NUM, #OPTIONAL
:l3_indentation => NUM, #OPTIONAL
:l4_indentation => NUM, #OPTIONAL
:l5_indentation => NUM, #OPTIONAL
:l6_indentation => NUM, #OPTIONAL
:l7_indentation => NUM, #OPTIONAL
:no_dots => true, #OPTIONAL
:disable_links => true, #OPTIONAL
:disable_back_links => true}, #OPTIONAL
:outline => {:outline => true, #OPTIONAL
:outline_depth => LEVEL} #OPTIONAL
end
end
end
end
By default, it will render without a layout (:layout => false) and the template for the current controller and action. (So, the template line in the above code is actually unnecessary.)
You must define absolute path's to CSS files, the best option is to use wicked_pdf_stylesheet_link_tag helper.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<%= wicked_pdf_stylesheet_link_tag "pdf" -%>
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
<%= yield %>
</div>
</body>
</html>
You can put your default configuration, applied to all pdf's at "wicked_pdf.rb" initializer.
Now you can use a debug param on the URL that shows you the content of the pdf in plain html to design it faster.
First of all you must configure the render parameter ":show_as_html" and then just use it like normally but adding "debug=1" as a param:
http://localhost:3001/CONTROLLER/X.pdf?debug=1
You may have noticed: this plugin is heavily inspired by the PrinceXML plugin princely. PrinceXML's cost was prohibitive for me. So, with a little help from some friends (thanks jqr), I tracked down wkhtmltopdf, and here we are.