Prawn vs. PDF::Writer comparison
Gregory Brown
Although this is blatent soliciting, I think you're going to like what
you see here.
The attached image shows two PDF tables, the one on the left side
generated by PDF::Writer, the one on the right generated by my
work-in-progress PDF library, Prawn. As you can see, their output is
not that much different, except for a difference of opinion on the
default look for headers.
The difference is in speed and code.
On my machine, to process an 1833 record table took 3.39s, whereas
PDF::Writer took 134.16s.
Prawn scales linearly, so you can expect double the amount of records
to take a little under 7s.
Below are code samples for each library:
== PDF::Writer ==
pdf = PDF::Writer.new
pdf.select_font("Helvetica")
table = PDF::SimpleTable.new do |tab|
tab.column_order.push(*%w(date rate))
tab.columns["date"] = PDF::SimpleTable::Column.new("date") { |col|
col.heading = "Date"
}
tab.columns["rate"] = PDF::SimpleTable::Column.new("rate") { |col|
col.heading = "Rate"
}
tab.orientation = :center
tab.shade_rows = :none
data = csv_data.map do |e|
{ "date" => e[0], "rate" => e[1] }
end
tab.data.replace data
end
table.render_on(pdf)
pdf.save_as('currency_pdf_writer.pdf')
== Prawn ==
doc = Prawn::Document.new
doc.table(csv_data, :font_size => 10,
:vertical_padding => 2,
:horizontal_padding => 5,
:position => :center,
:row_colors => ["ffffff","cccccc"],
:headers => ["Date","Rate"])
doc.render_file('currency_prawn.pdf')
----------------------------------------
Keep in mind that currently, PDF::Writer is being used all over the
place in production. Prawn is *not* ready for production just yet.
But what I would love to see is is the support of PDF::Writer users to
help make Prawn good enough to replace PDF::Writer as soon as we can
stabilize it.
If you're interested in helping test or develop on Prawn, please watch
it on github:
http://github.com/sandal/prawn
You can also get in touch about bug reports, feature requests, or
other questions via our mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/prawn-ruby
If you're an IRC user, there are usually some folks lurking in #prawn
on Freenode as well.
So, I won't regularly fill this list with Prawn noise, but I hope you
all find this interesting. :)
-greg
