On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Martin DeMello <martindemello / gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Redd Vinylene <reddvinylene / gmail.com> wrote:
>> Does anybody use this stuff as an alternative to LaTeX?
>
> I have a project that generates lout from ruby and then pdf from lout
> - I've been meaning to port it over to prawn and drop the external
> dependency. In general, I'd say that if you are machine-generating a
> PDF, a ruby library would be a lot more convenient to use than
> generating latex or lout or whatever.

Yes, the benefit of a pure-Ruby to PDF library is that there aren't
intermediate dependencies.  Of course, thinks like LaTeX or lout, or
Postscript (via the very cool RGhost library) might have their
benefits in certain situations, and might kick our butts performance
wise.

But when you use Prawn (or PDF::Writer), you've got vanilla Ruby that
generates a complete PDF.  The purists among us are sure to find that
appealing.

-greg

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