Prawn: Fast, Nimble PDF Generation For Ruby

Prawn is a pure Ruby PDF generation library that provides a lot of great
functionality while trying to remain simple and reasonably performant. Here are
some of the important features we provide:

• Vector drawing support, including lines, polygons, curves, ellipses, etc.
• Extensive text rendering support, including flowing text and limited inline
  formatting options.
• Support for both PDF builtin fonts as well as embedded TrueType fonts
• A variety of low level tools for basic layout needs, including a simple grid
  system
• PNG and JPG image embedding, with flexible scaling options
• Security features including encryption and password protection
• Tools for rendering repeatable content (i.e headers, footers, and page
  numbers)
• Comprehensive internationalization features, including full support for UTF-8
  based fonts, right-to-left text rendering, fallback font support, and extension
  points for customizable text wrapping.
• Support for PDF outlines for document navigation
• Low level PDF features, allowing users to create custom extensions by dropping
  down all the way to the PDF object tree layer. (Mostly useful to those with
  knowledge of the PDF specification)
• Lots of other stuff!

Should You Use Prawn?

If you are looking for a highly flexible PDF document generation system, Prawn
might be the tool for you. It is not a reporting tool or a publishing toolchain,
though it could be fairly easily used to build those things.

One thing Prawn is not, and will never be, is an HTML to PDF generator. For
those needs, consider looking into FlyingSaucer via JRuby, or one of the WebKit
based tools, like Wicked or PDFKit. We do have basic support for inline styling
but it is limited to a very small subset of functionality and is not suitable
for rendering rich HTML documents.

Supported Ruby Versions and Implementations

Because Prawn is pure Ruby and all of its runtime dependencies are maintained by
us, it should work pretty much anywhere. We officially support all Ruby versions
suported by Ruby Core Team and JRuby versions of matching Ruby version. However
we will accept patches to fix problems on other Ruby platforms if they aren’t
too invasive.

Installing Prawn

Prawn is distributed via RubyGems, and can be installed the usual way that you
install gems: by simply typing gem install prawn on the command line.

You can also install from git if you’d like, the master branch contains the
latest developments. We’re trying to keep master branch in working order but
you may encounter some rough edges and fresh bugs along with bugfixes. We
encourage you to try master branch with your application.

Hello World!

If the following code runs and produces a working PDF file, you’ve successfully
installed Prawn.

require "prawn"

Prawn::Document.generate("hello.pdf") do
  text "Hello World!"
end

Of course, you’ll probably want to do more interesting things than that…

Manual

The manual is a series of examples that demonstrate use of the wide range of
features Prawn provides. You can get a generated version of the latest released
Prawn version on the Prawn website. The examples
themselves can be found in the manual directory in this repository.

Please note that while the manual is a great introduction and guide to Prawn
it’s not exhaustive. Please refer to API docs for more complete information on
what Prawn provides and how to use it.

To build the manual, here’s what you need to do:

1. Clone the repository
2. Run gem install -g
3. Run rake manual, which will generate manual.pdf in the project root

Release Policies

We’re trying to not break things unnecessarily but we don’t formally follow
Semantic Versioning. The reason is that we release a number of experimental
APIs. We don’t make any promises on their stability. You can assume the stable
portion of the API follows Semantic Versioning.

Also note that bug fixes can change behaviour. We don’t consider that to be
a breaking change for the purposes of versioning. Please test your applications
after updating Prawn.

Be sure to read the release notes in
CHANGELOG.md each
time we cut a new release, and lock your gems accordingly.

Support

The easiest way to get help with Prawn is to post a message to our
Discussions.

Feel free to post any Prawn related question there, our community is very
responsive and will be happy to help you figure out how to use Prawn, or help
you determine whether it’s the right tool for the task you are working on.

Please make your posts as specific as possible, including code samples and
output where relevant. Do not post any information that should not be shared
publicly, and be sure to reduce your example code as much as possible so that
those who are responding to your question can more easily see what the issue
might be.

Code of Conduct

Prawn adheres to the Contributor Covenant. Unacceptable
behavior can be reported to [email protected] which is monitored by the core
team.

Contributing

If you’ve found a bug or want to submit a patch, please enter a ticket into our
GitHub tracker.

We strongly encourage bug reports to come with failing tests or at least a
reduced example that demonstrates the problem. Similarly, patches should include
tests, API documentation, and an update to the manual where relevant. Feel free
to send a pull request early though, if you just want some feedback or a code
review before preparing your code to be merged.

If you are unsure about whether or not you’ve found a bug, or want to check to
see whether we’d be interested in the feature you want to add before you start
working on it, feel free to post to our mailing list.

You can run our test suite in a few different ways:

1. Running rake will run the entire test suite excluding any unresolved issues
2. Running rspec will run the entire test suite including unresolved issues
3. Running rspec -t unresolved will run only unresolved issues
4. Running rspec -t issue:NUMBER will run the tests for a specific issue

These filters make it possible for us to add failing test cases for bugs that
are currently being researched or worked on, without breaking the typical full
suite run.

Maintenance team

Prawn has always been heavily dependent on community contributions, with dozens
of people contributing code over the years. In that sense, the lines have
blurred to the point where we no longer have a strong distinction between core
developers and contributors.

That said, there are a few folks who have been responsible for cutting releases,
merging important pull requests, and making major decisions about the overall
direction of the project.

Current maintainers

These are the folks to contact if you have a maintenance-related issue with
Prawn:

• Alexander Mankuta (PointlessOne)

Inactive maintainers

These folks have helped out in a maintenance role in the past, but are no longer
actively involved in the project:

• Gregory Brown (practicingruby)
• Brad Ediger (bradediger)
• James Healy (yob)
• Daniel Nelson (Bluejade)
• Jonathan Greenberg (jonsgreen)
• Jamis Buck (jamis)
• Evan Sharp (PacketMonkey)

License

Prawn is released under a slightly modified form of the License of Ruby,
allowing you to choose between Matz’s terms, the GPLv2, or GPLv3. For details,
please see the LICENSE, GPLv2, and GPLv3 files.

If you contribute to Prawn, you will retain your own copyright but must agree to
license your code under the same terms as the project itself.

History

Prawn was originally developed by Gregory
Brown, under the auspices of the Ruby
Mendicant Project, a grassroots initiative in which the Ruby community
collectively provided funding so that Gregory could take several months off from
work to focus on this project.

Over the last several years, we’ve received code contributions from dozens of
people, which is amazing considering the low-level nature of this project. You
can find the full list of folks who have at least one patch accepted to Prawn on
GitHub Contributors page.

After a long period of inactivity, Prawn reached its 1.0 milestone in 2014
thanks to some modest funding provided to Gregory by Madriska, Inc. (Brad
Ediger’s company).