Help choose my project for Ruby Mendicant - RubyMendicant

Message from discussion Help choose my project for Ruby Mendicant

Gregory Brown

More options Mar 26, 11:02 am

From: "Gregory Brown" <gregory.t.br...@gmail.com>

Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 11:02:41 -0400

Local: Wed, Mar 26 2008 11:02 am

Subject: Re: Help choose my project for Ruby Mendicant

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On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Nick B. <niko...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Greg,

> I think the ordering and wording of projects says a lot and I think
> that PDF::Writer is a much better project to spend time on. Ruby lacks
> a good PDF library and that's just one of the many reasons why some
> people pick other frameworks/languages over it. Java folks have iText,
> Python people have ReportLab etc. With some attention, PDF::Writer
> could surpass all of the other PDF libraries.

> The other proposal, Ruby 1.9 Field Medic, involves fixing other
> people's code and I think you'd waste a lot of time on it. The reason
> is that original authors and maintainers of those packages have the
> necessary skills (and plans) to upgrade the packages themselves... and
> only you and Mike really know how to fix PDF::Writer's issues. I also
> think that focusing on one package would be more productive than
> trying to do too much and work on all those other projects... quality
> vs quantity issue.

Well, the problem is we don't really know how to fix PDF::Writer's
issues, it's almost entirely Austin Ziegler's code, ported from a PHP
library.

However, given some dedicated time, I could build a very clean, very
Rubyish (non-ported) PDF library that works to support Ruby 1.9 and
m17n from the ground up.

Though my code name for this project is Prawn, as soon as it is fully
capable, I'd like to see it become PDF::Writer.

It seems like lots of people are behind this idea, where the other two
projects have had mixed opinions.

I'll drop a seperate post on this, suggesting that PDF is currently
the most popular project I've mentioned.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

-greg

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