Let's work on pdf.cr

Hello, I’m working on a fork of pdf.cr. It’s dedicated to generate a pdf file in pure crystal(instead of just wrapping a foreign library). I am also interesting in building a similar lib,however,this lib is just at it’s very beginning. Therefore, I forked this repo and started to complete it(here is my fork.

if this project can be finished, we can form a complete lib of pdf generator,therefore it can be used in other projects like file converters.

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Nice! What do you think about porting an existing pure Ruby library that generates PDF to Crystal instead?

As I know there is a ruby lib called prawn,and it is my major reference(though I sometimes get overwhelmed by it). Fow now I’m trying to implement the types in the pdf specification(ver 1.3).In order to implement the full prpject, I need fuurther improvements on my architect ability.

Do you have some preferred examples?

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That’s so exciting. I’ve been looking for a prawn equivalent for quite a while :+1:

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This is a great initiative. I used the wkhtmltopdf-crystal few years ago, but as you mention, it’s a wrapper foreign library. I’ll take a look at pdf.cr. I didn’t know it’s existance. Thanks for having us posted.

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This is a nice presentation on creating PDF files

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I recently created GitHub - threez/hpdf.cr: Create PDF documents in crystal using libhpdf / libharu it is not pure crystal but uses a c library. However it would allow you to build an abstraction on a higher level.

Generally I think we should less rewrite but more reuse. This way we can stand on the shoulder of giants. What is your opinion?

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This is quite convenient and pragmatic,except one problem. Since I work mainly on windows, I wonder if there is a haru available on windows,and how should I link extern libs in different OSs.

what if we port a pre-compiled haru within the shard? or should Windows users install this lib on their own?

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It seems to be a tutorial basic enough for me. is there other addresses available? there’s some problem for me getting these contents(contless timeout errors)

There’s a download button on it, here’s the URL for the PDF of the slides https://files.speakerdeck.com/presentations/6d1b3e5d3ae3403e80eb2515b7ac8e17/Let_s_write_a_PDF_file.pdf

Good point regarding windows I think as soon as windows is supported we would need a concept in general in crystal. Or is there already a way to support it?

Are there any recommended shards for reading PDFs and extracting text content for further analysis?