[ANN] Prawn 0.1.0 : Our first official release!

[Gregory Brown]

Prawn : Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generator
Release Version 0.1.0

= Description:

Prawn is a new pure Ruby PDF generation library, with the long term
goal of providing a suitable replacement for PDF::Writer. It is being
developed under the auspices of the Ruby Mendicant project with
copious help from a number of mighty fine contributors.

= Features:

This list isn't comprehensive, but Prawn has:

* Elementary text and graphics operations
* Support for built-in Adobe fonts (AFM)
* Support for TTF embedding without the need to generate an AFM file
* Automated page flow and text wrapping, with support for many page
sizes
* Basic text kerning support
* Cool 'bounding box' concept that eliminates lots of coordinate math
* m17n via UTF-8 text rendering (Auto-conversion of encodings on Ruby
1.9)
* Support for JPEG and PNG image embedding (Including PNG
Transparencies)
* Growing spec suite (PDF::Reader based), and example set
* Full Support for Ruby 1.9
* Orders of magnitude faster than PDF::Writer for table generation

= News:

After several non-release checkpoints, I've finally packaged up Prawn
for your alpha-testing enjoyment. The Ruby Mendicant project will
continue until 2008.09.16, which means I still have about 6 weeks of
full time work available.

The next step is to get Prawn integrated into Ruport, but I estimate
this will only take a week or two. After that, I will literally be
working full time implementing feature requests from our users until
mid-September. I will of course continue to maintain the project
after that, but now is your chance to try things out and report
problems / request features while there is still a dedicated focus on
this project.

Prawn is likely not yet ready for production, but is already useful
for many purposes. Please report problems and make suggestions after
trying this release.

= Install:

gem install prawn

Alternatively, you can clone the git repository with:

git clone git://github.com/sandal/prawn.git

= Resources:

- Project webpage with basic overview and some examples / sample
PDFs:
http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com

- API Documentation:
http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/docs/

- Github
http://github.com/sandal/prawn

- Mailing List
http://groups.google.com/group/prawn-ruby

- Bug Tracker / Wiki:
http://prawn.lighthouseapp.com

- RubyForge Page:
http://rubyforge.org/projects/prawn

- Prawnto, an unofficial Rails plugin for Prawn:
http://cracklabs.com/prawnto

There is also almost always a few people lurking / chatting in #prawn
on irc.freenode.net. I am <sandal> there.

= Acknowledgements:

I will be putting together a comprehensive acknowledgments page some
time before the end of the Ruby Mendicant project, because there are
so many people who have helped me out in the last several months.
However, I'd like to send special thanks to James Healy and Michael
Daines who have done some really critical work on the project and I'd
be much farther behind without their contributions.

= Until next time

Please enjoy Prawn and get in touch with suggestions!

-greg



--
Killer Ruby PDF Generation named after a magnificent sea creature:
http://github.com/sandal/prawn | Non-tech stuff at:
http://metametta.blogspot.com