We have recently done a few projects that required providing a PDF version of a page of reporting data.

Fortunately we were able to use the WickedPdf plugin (https://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf) to create the PDFs quickly and easily.

Here are some lessons that we learned while working with it.

1. Installing wkhtmltopdf

WickedPDF depends on wkhtmltopdf. There are a few different ways of installing it on Linux. One or more of these should work for you.

  1. 		
        # wkhtmltopdf-binary gem
	$ sudo gem install wkhtmltopdf-binary # rvmsudo if using rvm
	or
	gem 'wkhtmltopdf-binary' # in Gemfile

	Test the install of wkhtmltopdf
	$ wkhtmltopdf --help


  2. 		sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf  # ubuntu/debian

  3. Download the static version

    		# http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/downloads/list
	# from http://www.linkme.com.au/ui/unregistered/blogs/BlogPost.aspx?postId=72fc2553cfe3454bb11c00c16c583638
	sudo aptitude install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev

	#for 64bits OS
	$ wget http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
	$ tar xvjf wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
	$ chown root:root wkhtmltopdf-amd64
	$ mv wkhtmltopdf-amd64 /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf

	#for 32bits OS
	$ wget http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-i386.tar.bz2
	$ tar xvjf wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-i386.tar.bz2
	$ chown root:root wkhtmltopdf-i386
	$ mv wkhtmltopdf-i386 /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf

2. Install WickedPDF

rails plugin install git://github.com/mileszs/wicked_pdf.git

Find out where wkhtmltopdf was installed

$ which `wkhtmltopdf`

Set the path to wkhtmltopdf

# config/initializers/wicked_pdf.rb
WickedPdf.config = {
  :exe_path => '/path/to/wkhtmltopdf'
}

3. Render PDF


		# controllers/welcome_controller.rb
		def index
		  respond_to do |format|
		    format.html
		    format.pdf do
		      render :pdf => "my_pdf", # pdf will download as my_pdf.pdf
		        :layout => 'pdf', # uses views/layouts/pdf.haml
		    :show_as_html => params[:debug].present? # renders html version if you set debug=true in URL
		      end
		    end
		  end
		end

Take a look at a sample app for this on github

Bugs/Limitations

I wasn't able to get Javascript working with PDF. So if the page depends on Javascript, it won't render. I also had a problem getting the stylesheet helpers working. I had to inline all the css and then it worked.