Ruport or Prawn?

[Pito]

We, the open source digital voting foundation (www.osdv.org) are
developing software for printing election ballots. For our first
prototype we used Prawn and it works ok. But I was trying to judge
whether Ruport in the end offered an (appropriate) higher level
interface and it's not immediately clear to me whether Ruport is
suitable for these kinds of formats. Anyone have an opinion?

Here are the appearances of the real ballots we are trying to imitate:
http://www.trustthevote.org/wp-content/gallery/new-hampshire/Federal-Elections-3-3rd-Part-Candidates-in-one-Column-Bedford-General-Machine-2008.jpg
http://www.trustthevote.org/wp-content/gallery/new-hampshire/City-Elections-3-Columns,No-Questions,Write-Ins-concord-W1.jpg

I could attach images of the current output we are generating with
prawn, but it looks like there's no way to attach here.

Anyway the images above hopefully will make the requirements pretty
clear.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Andrew France]

Hi Pito,

> We, the open source digital voting foundation (www.osdv.org) are
> developing software for printing election ballots. For our first
> prototype we used Prawn and it works ok. But I was trying to judge
> whether Ruport in the end offered an (appropriate) higher level
> interface and it's not immediately clear to me whether Ruport is
> suitable for these kinds of formats. Anyone have an opinion?
>
> Here are the appearances of the real ballots we are trying to imitate:
> http://www.trustthevote.org/wp-content/gallery/new-hampshire/Federal-Elections-3-3rd-Part-Candidates-in-one-Column-Bedford-General-Machine-2008.jpg
> http://www.trustthevote.org/wp-content/gallery/new-hampshire/City-Elections-3-Columns,No-Questions,Write-Ins-concord-W1.jp

Looking at the ballots, because there appears to be very little data
involved (election, office, and candidates I assume) in a relatively
complex layout it will probably be easier to continue using Prawn as you
are. Ruport would be useful if you wanted to generate file formats other
than PDF, or have large amounts of tabular data to work with, but I
can't see it offering much value for this specific case.

Ruport uses the PDF Writer library which is quite old and established
now but I think Prawn pretty much matches, if not surpasses it, for
features and easy-of-use now.

Hope that helps, thanks for considering Ruport.

Andrew