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Rails-LaTeX ↑

Description ↑

rails-latex is a renderer for rails 3 which allows tex files with erb to be turned into an inline pdf.

Synopsis ↑

app/helpers/application_helper.rb:

def lesc(text)
  LatexToPdf.escape_latex(text)
end

app/views/stories/show.html.erb:

...
<%= link_to "print", story_path(@story,:format => :pdf) %>

app/views/stories/show.pdf.erb:

...
<%= lesc @story.name % >

app/views/layouts/application.pdf.erbtex:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,sloppy,< %= @landscape % >]{article}
...
< %= yield % >
\end{document}

config/initializers/mime_types.rb:

...
Mime::Type.register "application/pdf", :pdf, ['text/pdf'], ['pdf']

Only the file containing the \documentclass should be of type: .pdf.erbtex . Partials and views (when there is a layout) should be of type .pdf.erb .

If a LaTeX package requires two parses then add the following to the .pdf.erbtex file:

<% @latex_config={:parse_twice => true} %>

You can override the defaults like so:

LatexToPdf.config.merge! :command => 'xetex', :arguments => ['-etex'], :parse_twice => true

or to change just the arguments:

LatexToPdf.config[:arguments].delete('-halt-on-error')

The defaults are:

command: 'pdflatex'
arguments: ['-halt-on-error']
parse_twice: false

The last log file is moved to tmp/rails-latex/input.log . If the PDF is not produced the build directory is not removed; an archive script should be written to occasionally clean up the tmp/rails-latex directory.

See the rails application under examples/rails-latex-demo/ for a working example.

Generating a String ↑

If you need to generate the LaTeX document as a string you can use the render_to_string method. You will probably need to pass the :layout => true option to invoke the PDF generator. Here is an example to generate an email attachment:

In the controller you will have something along the lines of:

def send_email_method
  output = render_to_string(:template => "/your_model/your_view.pdf.erb", :layout => true)
  MyMailer.email_sender(current_user, output).deliver
end

The thing to note is the :layout => true which is needed so that the pdf template can grab the application erbtex layout. Then in your mailer:

def email_sender(user, pdf_attachment)
  @user = user
  attachments["attachment_name.pdf"] = {:mime_type => 'application/pdf', :content => pdf_attachment}
  mail( .... )
end

Requirements ↑

  • ruby 1.8 or 1.9

  • rails 3

Install ↑

  • gem install rails-latex

Development ↑

Developing rails-latex requires jeweler

  • rake test

  • rake build

Contributions ↑

  • Tommaso Patrizi

  • Klaus Reske