This brief blog post is in response to the many emails you wrote to me, to blog a bit about PDF::Writer for Ruby.

PDF::Writer for Ruby by Austin Ziegler, provides the ability to create PDF documents using only native Ruby libraries. Many web applications may want to offer PDF as one possible download format.

If you need to convert PDF to Word in order to more easily edit your PDF files then a specialized piece of PDF converter software is probably better than free online ones.

On your Windows, load the pdf-writer gem and write a PDF. If you don’t already have pdf-writer on your system, just run the following command:

gem install pdf-writer

Now you can use the gem mechanism to load pdf-writer and create a PDF document, as shown in the following example:

require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'pdf-writer'

pdf = PDF::Writer.new
pdf.select_font "Times-Roman"
pdf.text "Hello, Ruby." , :font_size => 72, :justification => :center
pdf.save_as("hello.pdf" )

The call to require ‘rubygems’ loads the gem mechanism, and then the call require_gem ‘pdf-writer’ loads the pdf-writer gem.

The above example is adapted from the tutorial/article on how to publish printable documents at artima.com. In this article, Austin Ziegler introduces the creation of a variety of types of documents with PDF::Writer for Ruby. This introduction covers basic creation, partial document generation and customization, and Rails-generated documents.

Ruby/GTK2 is a library that allows Ruby applications to use GTK+ 2.x library. GTK+ is open source and is released under the GNU LGPL licence, so it may be used freely for commercial applications. Ruby/GTK2 is available on Linux, Windows, Mac OS.

GTK+ has a rich set of widgets from the basic ones like labels, buttons to the advanced like tree controls etc.

The following URLs will be useful:

• Download Ruby/GTK2
• Installation details for Windows
• Ruby/GTK2 API
• Ruby/GTK2 Tutorials

Robert Evans has come up with the Ruby Snips site. In his words:

Ruby Snips is an idea that I’ve had for a while, but only recently have put together in my mind. I love Code Snippets, formerly owned by Peter Cooper, but I’ve always found myself wishing to be able to search the snippets easily and have a semi-brief explanation of the snippet being displayed.

Another aspect that has brought about this site is that I am always learning new things that can be done with Ruby and I’d like to have a centralized place of snippets with explanations and thoughts for myself and for anyone else learning Ruby. This site isn’t terribly unique in any sense, but rather another resource for the Ruby community.

ED4W is a full featured Programmer’s Editor/IDE with support for 30+ languages. It includes all of the editing capabilities you would expect, plus a built-in Source Database Engine that tracks every class, method, module, struct etc. in real time enabling you to instantly jump to any function etc. and making navigation of large complex code bases much easier.

The blog post will give you a good overview of ED’s capabilities with a specific focus on Ruby.

You can download the 30-day trial version from the ED Web site.

Saw this on Ruby-Talk - CodeGear (the Borland spin-off) has a survey open on Ruby and Ruby on Rails. If you have two minutes, your input on this survey would help. Take the survey.