Prawn Print

Ruby gem that adds print and autoprint methods for Adobe Reader to generated Prawn PDF documents.

The documents can be opened in any PDF reader, but only Adobe Reader supports triggering printing in this way.

Installation

With Bundler for e.g. Ruby on Rails, add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'prawn-print', :git => 'git://github.com/barsoom/prawn-print.git'

and run

bundle

to install it.

Usage

# Open print dialog, but don't autoprint.
pdf = Prawn::Document.new
pdf.text "I installed Adobe Reader and all I got was this lousy printout."
pdf.print

# Autoprint it on the default printer, when opened.
pdf = Prawn::Document.new
pdf.text "Help! I am trapped in a PDF factory!"
pdf.autoprint

# Autoprint it on a printer where the name includes "LaserJet".
pdf = Prawn::Document.new
pdf.text "Help! I am trapped in a PDF factory!"
pdf.autoprint "LaserJet"

You can call print/autoprint at any place of the generated PDF – it doesn't have to be at the end.

Caveats

Sadly, autoprinting isn't fully hands-off – for security reasons, Reader will show a confirmation dialog.

Credits and license

Based on prawn-js by James Healy, forked and fixed by Karl Smith, and on JavaScript samples found somewhere on the web at the dawn of time.

Glued together by Henrik Nyh for Barsoom under the MIT license:

Copyright (c) 2011 Barsoom AB

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.