Wicked PDF uses the shell utility wkhtmltopdf to serve a PDF file to a user from HTML. In other words, rather than dealing with a PDF generation DSL of some sort, you simply write an HTML view as you would normally, then let Wicked take care of the hard stuff.
Wicked PDF has been verified to work on Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.2; Rails 2 and Rails 3
First, be sure to install wkhtmltopdf.
One simple way to install all of the binaries (Linux, OSX, Windows) is through the gem wkhtmltopdf-binary. To install, simply add
gem 'wkhtmltopdf-binary'To your Gemfile.
If your wkhtmltopdf executable is not on your webserver's path, configure it in an initializer:
WickedPdf.config = {
:exe_path => '/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf'
}Note that versions before 0.9.0 have problems on some machines with reading/writing to streams. This plugin relies on streams to communicate with wkhtmltopdf.
For more information about wkhtmltopdf, see the project's homepage and github repo. There's also some documentation for a recent, stable version on the author's website, here.
Next:
script/plugin install git://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf.git
script/generate wicked_pdf
or add this to your Gemfile:
gem 'wicked_pdf'You may also need to add
Mime::Type.register "application/pdf", :pdfto config/initializers/mime_types.rb
class ThingsController < ApplicationController
def show
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.pdf do
render :pdf => "file_name"
end
end
end
endThe wkhtmltopdf binary is run outside of your Rails application; therefore, your normal layouts will not work. If you plan to use any CSS, Javascript, or image files, you must modify your layout so that you provide an absolute reference to these files. The best option for Rails without the asset pipeline is to use the wicked_pdf_stylesheet_link_tag, wicked_pdf_image_tag, and wicked_pdf_javascript_include_tag helpers or to go straight to a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for popular libraries such as jQuery.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<%= wicked_pdf_stylesheet_link_tag "pdf" -%>
<%= wicked_pdf_javascript_include_tag "number_pages" %>
</head>
<body onload='number_pages'>
<div id="header">
<%= wicked_pdf_image_tag 'mysite.jpg' %>
</div>
<div id="content">
<%= yield %>
</div>
</body>
</html>In this case, you can use that standard Rails helpers and point to the current CDN for whichever framework you are using. For jQuery, it would look somethng like this, given the current versions at the time of this writing.
<!DOCTYPE...
<html...
<head>
<%= javascript_include_tag "http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.0.min.js" %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "http://code.jquery.com/ui/1.10.3/jquery-ui.min.js" %>The way to handle this for the asset pipeline on Heroku is to include these files in your asset precompile list, as follows:
config.assets.precompile += ['blueprint/screen.css', 'pdf.css', 'jquery.ui.datepicker.js', 'pdf.js', ...etc...]
class ThingsController < ApplicationController
def show
respond_to do |format|
format.html
format.pdf do
render :pdf => 'file_name',
:disposition => 'attachment', # default 'inline'
:template => 'things/show.pdf.erb',
:file => "#{Rails.root}/files/foo.erb"
:layout => 'pdf.html', # use 'pdf.html' for a pdf.html.erb file
:wkhtmltopdf => '/usr/local/bin/wkhtmltopdf', # path to binary
:show_as_html => params[:debug].present?, # allow debuging based on url param
:orientation => 'Landscape', # default Portrait
:page_size => 'A4, Letter, ...', # default A4
:save_to_file => Rails.root.join('pdfs', "#{filename}.pdf"),
:save_only => false, # depends on :save_to_file being set first
:proxy => 'TEXT',
:basic_auth => false # when true username & password are automatically sent from session
:username => 'TEXT',
:password => 'TEXT',
:cover => 'URL, Pathname, or raw HTML string',
:dpi => 'dpi',
:encoding => 'TEXT',
:user_style_sheet => 'URL',
:cookie => ['_session_id SESSION_ID'], # could be an array or a single string in a 'name value' format
:post => ['query QUERY_PARAM'], # could be an array or a single string in a 'name value' format
:redirect_delay => NUMBER,
:javascript_delay => NUMBER,
:image_quality => NUMBER,
:zoom => FLOAT,
:page_offset => NUMBER,
:javascript_delay => NUMBER,
:book => true,
:default_header => true,
:disable_javascript => false,
:grayscale => true,
:lowquality => true,
:enable_plugins => true,
:disable_internal_links => true,
:disable_external_links => true,
:print_media_type => true,
:disable_smart_shrinking => true,
:use_xserver => true,
:no_background => true,
:viewport_size => 'TEXT' # available only with use_xserver or patched QT
:extra => '' # directly inserted into the command to wkhtmltopdf
:margin => {:top => SIZE, # default 10 (mm)
:bottom => SIZE,
:left => SIZE,
:right => SIZE},
:header => {:html => { :template => 'users/header.pdf.erb', # use :template OR :url
:layout => 'pdf_plain.html', # optional, use 'pdf_plain.html' for a pdf_plain.html.erb file, defaults to main layout
:url => 'www.example.com',
:locals => { :foo => @bar }},
:center => 'TEXT',
:font_name => 'NAME',
:font_size => SIZE,
:left => 'TEXT',
:right => 'TEXT',
:spacing => REAL,
:line => true,
:content => 'HTML CONTENT ALREADY RENDERED'}, # optionally you can pass plain html already rendered (useful if using pdf_from_string)
:footer => {:html => { :template => 'shared/footer.pdf.erb', # use :template OR :url
:layout => 'pdf_plain.html', # optional, use 'pdf_plain.html' for a pdf_plain.html.erb file, defaults to main layout
:url => 'www.example.com',
:locals => { :foo => @bar }},
:center => 'TEXT',
:font_name => 'NAME',
:font_size => SIZE,
:left => 'TEXT',
:right => 'TEXT',
:spacing => REAL,
:line => true,
:content => 'HTML CONTENT ALREADY RENDERED'}, # optionally you can pass plain html already rendered (useful if using pdf_from_string)
:toc => {:font_name => "NAME",
:depth => LEVEL,
:header_text => "TEXT",
:header_fs => SIZE,
:l1_font_size => SIZE,
:l2_font_size => SIZE,
:l3_font_size => SIZE,
:l4_font_size => SIZE,
:l5_font_size => SIZE,
:l6_font_size => SIZE,
:l7_font_size => SIZE,
:l1_indentation => NUM,
:l2_indentation => NUM,
:l3_indentation => NUM,
:l4_indentation => NUM,
:l5_indentation => NUM,
:l6_indentation => NUM,
:l7_indentation => NUM,
:no_dots => true,
:disable_links => true,
:disable_back_links => true},
:outline => {:outline => true,
:outline_depth => LEVEL}
end
end
end
endBy default, it will render without a layout (:layout => false) and the template for the current controller and action.
If you need to just create a pdf and not display it:
# create a pdf from a string
pdf = WickedPdf.new.pdf_from_string('<h1>Hello There!</h1>')
# create a pdf file from a html file without converting it to string
# Path must be absolute path
pdf = WickedPdf.new.pdf_from_html_file('/your/absolute/path/here')
# create a pdf from string using templates, layouts and content option for header or footer
WickedPdf.new.pdf_from_string(
render_to_string('templates/pdf.html.erb', :layout => 'pdfs/layout_pdf'),
:footer => {
:content => render_to_string(:layout => 'pdfs/layout_pdf')
}
)
# or from your controller, using views & templates and all wicked_pdf options as normal
pdf = render_to_string :pdf => "some_file_name"
# then save to a file
save_path = Rails.root.join('pdfs','filename.pdf')
File.open(save_path, 'wb') do |file|
file << pdf
endIf you need to display utf encoded characters, add this to your pdf views or layouts:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />A bit of javascript can help you number your pages. Create a template or header/footer file with this:
<html>
<head>
<script>
function number_pages() {
var vars={};
var x=document.location.search.substring(1).split('&');
for(var i in x) {var z=x[i].split('=',2);vars[z[0]] = unescape(z[1]);}
var x=['frompage','topage','page','webpage','section','subsection','subsubsection'];
for(var i in x) {
var y = document.getElementsByClassName(x[i]);
for(var j=0; j<y.length; ++j) y[j].textContent = vars[x[i]];
}
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="number_pages()">
Page <span class="page"></span> of <span class="topage"></span>
</body>
</html>Anything with a class listed in "var x" above will be auto-filled at render time.
If you do not have explicit page breaks (and therefore do not have any "page" class), you can also use wkhtmltopdf's built in page number generation by setting one of the headers to "[page]":
render :pdf => 'filename', :header => { :right => '[page] of [topage]' }You can put your default configuration, applied to all pdf's at "wicked_pdf.rb" initializer.
If you would like to have WickedPdf automatically generate PDF views for all (or nearly all) pages by appending .pdf to the URL, add the following to your Rails app:
# in application.rb (Rails3) or environment.rb (Rails2)
require 'wicked_pdf'
config.middleware.use WickedPdf::MiddlewareIf you want to turn on or off the middleware for certain urls, use the :only or :except conditions like so:
# conditions can be plain strings or regular expressions, and you can supply only one or an array
config.middleware.use WickedPdf::Middleware, {}, :only => '/invoice'
config.middleware.use WickedPdf::Middleware, {}, :except => [ %r[^/admin], '/secret', %r[^/people/\d] ]If you use the standard render :pdf => 'some_pdf' in your app, you will want to exclude those actions from the middleware.
Andreas Happe's post Generating PDFs from Ruby on Rails
JESii's post WickedPDF, wkhtmltopdf, and Heroku...a tricky combination
StackOverflow questions with the tag "wicked-pdf"
Now you can use a debug param on the URL that shows you the content of the pdf in plain html to design it faster.
First of all you must configure the render parameter ":show_as_html => params[:debug]" and then just use it like normally but adding "debug=1" as a param:
http://localhost:3001/CONTROLLER/X.pdf?debug=1
However, the wicked_pdf_* helpers will use file:/// paths for assets when using :show_as_html, and your browser's cross-domain safety feature will kick in, and not render them. To get around this, you can load your assets like so in your templates:
<%= params[:debug].present? ? image_tag('foo') : wicked_pdf_image_tag('foo') %>You may have noticed: this plugin is heavily inspired by the PrinceXML plugin princely. PrinceXML's cost was prohibitive for me. So, with a little help from some friends (thanks jqr), I tracked down wkhtmltopdf, and here we are.
- Fork it
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature) - Create new Pull Request
Also, thanks to unixmonkey, galdomedia, jcrisp, lleirborras, tiennou, and everyone else for all their hard work and patience with my delays in merging in their enhancements.