Printing reports and invoices with Ruby?

Question

I'm just learning Ruby, and I'm wondering how to create reports and invoices (with logo, address field, footer, variable number of invoice elements (sometimes leading to more than one page), transfer the amount paid from one page to the following, free-floating text of two columns (left and right justified) below the total cash information.)

Currently, I am getting a canvas for printing and drawing from the operating system (corresponding to the printer specification) and use some functions of drawing, moving, line, text and shape and the API and do some heavy calculations for textblock- (a bit of TeX-like).

How will this be done in Ruby?

Create .odt and drop it in OpenOffice or .tex and drop it in LaTeX?

Or are there any free libraries that do all these things for me, so I just need to feed the appropriate parts and let Ruby do text formatting?

EDIT:

More specifically: I want to place the corporate logo on the first page (DIN-A4 format, but can also be a letter) in a specific place, as well as the footer on each page and the address block on the first page. all others should be free floating text blocks with left-right alignment, bold in the middle of the texts.

sort of

pdf.column.blocktext("Hello Mr. P\nwe have [b]good news[/b] for you. bla bla bla and so on. Please keep this text together (no page break)..."); pdf.column.floatingblock("This is another block, that should be printed, and can be broken over more than one column..."); 

which should visualize the text in a corporate font on paper, be reasonable and carefully wrap around the next column / page if it reaches the bottom of the page.

Thinking about it, this is exactly what LaTeX is for.

Answer 1

I suggest you consider the possibility of generating PDF. In Rails, this is pretty simple with the Prawn library.

There is also a new new Railcast transmission .

The official website .

Answer 2

You can also check the HtmlDoc to create PDF files, it just takes the HTML code and creates a PDF file from it. This approach is good because it allows you to very easily reuse a partial copy of an invoice on screen and on paper.

http://blog.adsdevshop.com/2007/11/20/easy-pdf-generation-with-ruby-rails-and-htmldoc/

Answer 3

The Ruport library (Ruby Reports) makes it fairly easy to spill report tables in several formats, including PDF. There is also an ActiveRecord acts_as_reportable hook that gives your models a reporting interface.