Ezprint¶ ↑

Ezprint is a drop in replacement for the princely plugin. It uses PDFKit as the backend instead of princexml, possibly saving you millions of dollars. I recommend using the Rack middleware component of PDFKit to print PDFs in rails, but this plugin makes an easy transition from prince->PDFKit for those using princely.

Installation¶ ↑

Version 1.0.0 deprecates support for Rails 2. For Rails 2.x support, install an earlier version.

gem ‘ezprint’

then run “bundle install”

Example¶ ↑

The examples here are similar to princely, since the
plugin is basically a reworking of the princely source

class PDFExample < ApplicationController
  def show
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.pdf do
        render :pdf => "My Awesome PDF",
               :template => "controller/action.pdf.erb",
               :stylesheets => ["application","print"]
               :layout => "pdf"
      end
    end
  end

  # Alternatively, you can use make_and_send_pdf to
  # render out a PDF for the action without a
  # respond_to block.
  def pdf
    make_and_send_pdf("file_name")
  end
end

Render Defaults¶ ↑

The defaults for the render options are as follows:

layout:      false
template:    the template for the current controller/action
stylesheets: none

Using another PDF processor¶ ↑

While ezprint has been designed with PDFKit in mind, other PDF processors such as princexml can be used. A princexml processor is included and can be used by setting Ezprint.processor = :prince in an initializer.

It’s also easy to create your own processor:

module Ezprint
  module Processors
    class MyProcessor < Base
      def self.process(html_string, options = {})
        # Code to return a PDF string from an html string here.
      end
    end
  end
end

Possible Gotchas¶ ↑

If you’re getting a “Broken Pipe” error when rendering PDF documents, you may need to install the wkhtmltopdf-binary gem or put it in your Gemfile.

Credits¶ ↑

• Michael Bleigh for writing the awesome princely plugin, which most of the code is reworked from.

Resources¶ ↑

• Copyright © 2012 Jason Stewart, released under the MIT license.