Question

I’m using Prawn to generate my PDF files from a HTML source. This HTML contains only some basic formatting, such as bold, italic, underlines, ordered and unordered lists. For the first three, Prawn will take care of using :inline_format => true in the text command.

How do I tell Prawn to understand uland ol tags and turn them into lists in the PDF file? I understand I should use some helper. Anyone has faced this before?

Thanks!

Answer 1

As such, Prawn does not provide an in-built HTML parse and hence, it won’t know what the ul and li tags mean. Prawn’s Text-box might be the closest option.

EDIT:

—

To this end, here is a small, feasible implementation:

Say the html string is <ul><li>First line</li><li>Second line</li></ul>

Using any Ruby HTML parser, you can parse the lines. Here I’ve used Nokogiri.

require 'nokogiri'
require 'prawn'

Prawn::Document.generate "result.pdf" do |pdf|
  Nokogiri::HTML("html_string_above").xpath('//li').each do |node|
    pdf.text_box "#{node.inner_html}"
  end
end

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It would be a lot easier to use a html to pdf conversion gems to achieve this. Take a look at WickedPDF project.