2

I need to both read in and write pdf files and in some cases merge a pdf I have with the one I need to read in. I attempted to do this with the pdf-reader gem and the prawn gem.

The pdf-reader gem doesn't seem to allow straight copying of a file, but instead just pulling text out of files without formatting or images unless you write them in seperately. And even then it only pulls out pieces of files and skips others. Anything else out there for ruby ?

Edit: To be more specific, in some cases I need an exact copy of the pdf, and in others I will need to overlay the copy of one on top of the copy of another. Neither pdf-reader or docsplit seem to be able to make a copy (read in text/formatting/images/fonts etc).

cbron
  • 4,036
  • 3
  • 33
  • 40

4 Answers4

0

You can use Lucene or Solr (has hooks for Ruby on Rails) to index and read in .pdf files as well as Microsoft documents (i.e. Word, PowerPoint, Excel).

socialmatchbox
  • 83
  • 7
0

https://github.com/paulschreiber/pdf-merger

hrishy
  • 1
  • This seems to only merge files. I need to read in files and display them with rails as well. – cbron Nov 26 '11 at 05:58
0

try this: Prawn: Fast, Nimble PDF Generation For Ruby https://github.com/sandal/prawn

lidaobing
  • 1,005
  • 13
  • 26
0

After playing around a lot I found this question: overlay one pdf or ps file on top of another

Seems that pdftk is as good as its going to get.

Rails has a gem for this but it looks like it doesn't support overlay: http://pdf-toolkit.rubyforge.org/

EDIT: Looks like a much better gem is out there but unpublished that supports overlay: https://github.com/tcocca/active_pdftk

Community
  • 1
  • 1
cbron
  • 4,036
  • 3
  • 33
  • 40