Abnormalities

Some time ago, I has some troubles using RGhost and RGhost-Rails because of issues on my environment, to be precise, issues with my Ghostscript install. I was rushing with one project and I lost much time investigating the issue, so I was obliged to change from RGhost to Prawn (that have no external dependency).

But I really like - and prefer - to create PDF using EPS templates, what made me dig into this issue a little more. So that’s I found the solution.

Installing a most recent version of Ghostscript, make the things works again. I don’t know why, but 8.60 version has some issues here. Installing the 8.63 fixed the error: “Unrecoverable error, exit code 1”.

Bellow the link to download and the page that I found this:
http://idisk.mac.com/yhonda-Public/Ghostscript-8.63.pkg.zip
http://sites.google.com/site/imaximaimath/download-and-install/easy-install-on-mac-os-x

RGhost and RGhost-Rails

I really like the report resulted from an EPS Template. RGhost do this with perfection - lines and elements very good defined on the document. Quick, precise and light - yeah - do all the job without a lot of processing and memory consumption.

I started on a project with RGhost, but some issues with my environment after installing the last version of Xcode or after removing the MacPorts made me change the library - unfortunatelly - because I really enjoyed in using it and because I didn’t find other so cool like this one.

Ok, it isn’t so easy to draw each item on your position - we are talking about PDF reports on web - with Rails - without that bloated IDEs and without report design tools. :P

Prawn and Prawnto

Simplicity and no dependencies. There are a lot of missing features - but it works. There are some examples of Prawn use on the Prawnto homepage.

No EPS support yet - but it does the work fine. I enjoyed the result but there are some issues with the cpu processment from these gems - took a lot of time to generate the report here - maybe this impression was caused by the RGhost - since was my first attempt with Ruby and PDF reports.

So - both tools do the job - if you want EPS support and a ghostscript dependency isn’t a problem for you - RGhost is the perfect tool. But if you need a pure implementation and no advanced formatting text features - Prawn works fine too.

>> d = Time.now
=> Fri Dec 04 23:12:59 -0200 2009
>> d.in_time_zone("Buenos Aires")
=> Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:12:59 ART -03:00