Rails RTex Plugin: Generating PDFs (2006-03-17)
One of the challenges that I’ve recently run into in the midst of Rails work has been PDF generation. For one project, it’s a mandatory requirement, and, unfortunately, PDF::Writer simply isn’t fast enough to handle the amount or complexity of the content.
I’ve liked LaTeX for several years; I’ve used it for resumés, business cards, and letterheads, and have always been impressed with its professional quality—especially when it comes to fonts. The speed isn’t bad, either.
Back in my PHP and Python days, I wrote a number of quick hacks to push generated .tex files through LaTeX, with pretty good results, so the last day or two I started thinking…
Why not offer a template format in Rails to generate LaTeX files for pdfLaTeX?
Yesterday morning, that’s exactly what I started putting together, and I’m happy to release the initial result of the work in a new Rails plugin, RTex.
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, see the RTex Plugin page for more details.
