On 6/14/05, Aleksi <foobar / fuzzball.org.net> wrote:
> Austin Ziegler wrote:
>> At long last, I have released PDF::Writer 1.0. The released
>> version is 1.0.1 and is available from RubyForge:
>> 
>> Homepage::  http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-pdf/
> Thanks! This looks promising! But it's hard to evaluate immediate
> usefulness without seeing results and API.

> Any chances to get a "Project Home Page" with (at least the same
> info that you wrote in this email and) the complex manual as a
> show case and browsable API reference (and/or documentation). Now
> I guess I'll be able to reach it only by installing and running or
> generating RDoc on my own.

Yes. All of this *will* be made available, but it's taking a bit of
time as I do have to do this in my spare time and work is quite busy
right now (with equally interesting stuff -- XMPP!).

It may be next week before the first pass at the home page gets
posted. I'm currently evaluating a couple of different technologies
that will help me reduce the amount of duplicated information I have
to type ;)

>> The release contains several demonstration programs and the
>> canonical 82-page manual in PDF. On my home development machine
>> (a 1Ghz Transmeta Crusoe with 512 Mb RAM), it takes about 5
>> minutes to generate the manual; it should be faster on most
>> machines (about 1m 30s on my work machine).
> At first this seemed to be quite slow, but then, if a document of
> some complexity takes roughly 1 sec / page it might not be that
> bad. Unless you've used to LaTeX but then you have used to many
> other problems as well :).

There are some important points to measure with this timing. First,
this is pure Ruby. There's no C code in this library, except the
Ruby interpreter. Second, the manual has at about two dozen tables,
and tables are known to be the slowest thing in the library --
because of the way that I implement the necessary backtracking
capabilities/undo buffer (as whole objects using
Transaction::Simple).

What I know is that Leslie Hensley is generating 6-page documents
relatively quickly. Whether this is a partially generated PDF (a
technique that I will be illustrating in the web pages) or fully
generated on the fly, I don't know. But it's visibly responsive for
web downloads (~3 seconds or less).

There's definitely some neat tricks, and there will be some
improvements that I will be making to the API over time. Some of
these will come a little later, as they will be breaking existing
APIs (I meant to, but forgot to, improve the image APIs to allow for
easy hyperlinked images; however, I was looking over the reference
documentation on annotations and actions and see that I need to
drastically improve *that* moving forward, too.) Others may come in
the near future as I get a few other things done (such as maybe
having an #each that iterates through the pages on the document).

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin / halostatue.ca