= Princess
Princess is a Ruby on Rails plugin that wraps Prince [ http://princexml.com ]
for easily generating beautiful pdfs using familiar HTML and CSS.
Besides the typical uses for generating pdfs, Princess also makes it easy to generate printable labels (mailing labels, name tags, etc) and automatically
turning every page on your site into a printable PDF simply by adding '.pdf'
to the end of the url.
== Requirements
Princess requires that you have Prince installed and accessible on your
system. You can download a free trial/personal version for testing purposes
at http://princexml.com .
Princess was built and tested on Rails 2.0.2 and may not (probably won't) work
with prior versions.
== Alternatives and Acknowledgements
Other Rails plugins that also wrap Prince;
* Princely - [ http://www.mbleigh.com/plugins/princely-rails-prince-xml-wrapper ]
This blog post by 'seth' at Subimage provided the inspiration and basis for
Princess (and presumably Princely, as well).
http://sublog.subimage.com/articles/2007/05/29/html-css-to-pdf-using-ruby-on-rails
== Basic PDF Generation
Use respond_to in your controller actions and define a pdf format. Within the format
definition, call send_pdf and pass it appropirate arguments. For example...
respond_to do |format|
format.html #default
format.pdf do
send_pdf(
:template => 'prince_transcript.html.erb',
:stylesheet => 'prince_transcript',
:layout => 'transcript',
:filename => "#{@student.last_name}-transcript.pdf"
)
end
end
== Creating Labels
Princess comes with some built-in templates for generating standard labels
(such as address labels, name tags, etc). To use this feature, simply pass the name
of the built-in template in your send_pdf call (described above), a :collection argument
containing a collection of objects to render, and a :partial argument defining a partial
that describes the structure for individual labels. For example...
respond_to do |format|
format.pdf do
send_pdf(
:template => :avery_5390,
:collection => @people,
:partial => 'conference_nametag'
)
end
end
Creating new label formats not currently provided is as simple as copying one of
the built in format templates and adjusting a few measurements in it. Detailed
instructions are provided inside the 'avery_5390' template.
== Auto Generating PDFs as 'print view' of normal HTML pages.
Optionally, princess can turn every page on your site into a printable PDF simply
by adding .pdf to the end of the URL. To enable this feature, add the following to
the controller (or to application controller for site wide).
princess_provides_default_pdf
If any of your controller actions define their own custom pdf file, such as with
respond_to as described above in 'Basic PDF Generation', then that PDF will take
precedence and the automatic/default PDF generation described in this section
will not occur.
You will probably also want to add a 'default_pdfs' directory to app/views/layouts.
In it add the following and use just like normal layouts (add your own HTML and a
<%= yield %>).
application.pdf.erb controller_name.pdf.erb
== Copyright
Copyright (c) 2008 Worldwide IDEA, Inc. [ http://www.wwidea.org ], released under the MIT license