#Pdfkit templates pdf
#Pdfkit templates series
#Pdfkit templates download

I recommend committing a cached footer html page to any source control you have for deployment. In my example above, I override ActionController's perform_caching class and instance methods so that all actions in this controller would cache. The parent document will request this URL for each page it renders, so you can see how one process could deadlock another if your were not careful. However, if want to use Rails templating to render that file, it is important to cache the results. Ideally the URL argument to -footer-html would be a static HTML file. All the rest is to achieve an important set of caching rules.

There is not much here past rendering a basic template file with no layout. 2 inches for the bottom margin using a rails initializer.Ĭlass PdfController false end private def perform_caching true end end 2 inches tall, I gave it's template an internal top margin of 10 pixels and told PDFKit to increase my global. In my case, since I knew my footer was around. The second is by adjusting the margin of the parent document. The first is by adjusting the layout of the header/footer HTML page. You can control the placement of these in one of two ways.

#Pdfkit templates pdf

When it comes to headers and footers, wkhtmltopdf takes the URL to an HTML page, renders it to native PDF code and embeds it automatically for you below or above your page margin. Note, it is important to use fully qualified URLs for header and footer arguments. In this case -foter-html will be used as a command argument to wkhtmltopdf when rendering templates using that layout file. PDFKit will take any meta tag with a name prefixed using 'pdfkit-' and pass down the content attribute as the value to the suffix of the name attribute. The first is a way for PDFKit to customize the command arguments passed down to wkhtmltopdf when the page is converted. So what is going on here? Two things really. Thereby making the file a catch-all for any mime type. Now to render a template/partial for multiple mime types you must remove them all together from the name. Somewhere along the way to Rails 3, dual mime type support was lost. So in this case, the layout will be found when rendering both HTML and. Did you see that name? This is important! because Rails allows us to specify template names that can service more than one mime type format. Here is a HAML file that I recommend you name app/views/layouts/.

So the first thing we need is a new layout for all of our pdf templates to use. Sometimes it is useful to start at the end. Let me say that again, we can TEST our PDF code! A huge win if you have complex conditional view code. This means that we test our PDF view code just like any other Rails code using its built-in functional or integration test cases. The major reason to use PDFKit and wkhtmltopdf is that we can use the same templating system in Rails that we use to generate other views.

#Pdfkit templates series

We are going to build out the Rails HTML/CSS layouts and templates that will solve a series of common problems. So let's skip over the basics and get right down to using PDFKit like a pro. I happily found out that wkhtmltopdf has a solution for all these problems and can layout PDF pages with pixel perfect precision. I knew that HTML to PDF generation has its drawbacks, specifically with common headers/footers and page breaks. I suggest placing wkhtmltopdf in /usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf. I have tested both the OSX and i386 on RHEL with success and the release candidate seems very production ready. I highly suggest that you get the latest 0.10.0rc2 since some topics below take advantage of recent bug fixes.

#Pdfkit templates download

So go to their download page and pick the statically compiled binary that meets your needs. Thankfully the google project page hosts a batch of static binaries that work on just about every platform. The hard part is getting the wkhtmltopdf binaries for you platform installed. Installing the PDFKit gem is a no brainer. But many topics will apply to both PDFKit and WickedPdf since they use wkhtmltopdf on the backside.

In this article I am only going to focus on PDFKit with Rails. This is the muscle behind the PDFKit gem and other projects like WickedPdf.

Wkhtmltopdf is an open source project that uses the WebKit rendering engine to convert HTML to native PDF code. Sure there are gems like Prawn that make this much easier, but nothing beats drawing your pdf code in native HTML and CSS, and that is where wkhtmltopdf comes in. In short, its a damn chore that involves a bunch of code that mixes both data and presentation. Why? Well drawing pdfs in ruby using libraries like PDF::Writer is like composing a webpage with an Etch A Sketch. Last week I had the pleasure of rewriting 4 years of legacy PDF::Writer code to PDFKit.