Prawn

This page is a list of ideas from myself and other folk. For the more 'official' roadmap, see the Development Plans page.

Flowing Between Bounding Boxes.

It would be nice to enable smooth flowing from one bounding box to another. Paul Novak suggests building an object which would feed some text to each bounding box, allowing them to consume however much text they can fit and then pass the rest on to the next box.

Eager Rendering

James Gray suggests that Prawn should output rendered PDF objects as early as possible, so as not to leave objects laying around that won't be reused, and keep the memory footprint low. This will require some special consideration for pages but other ref() calls might be easy to convert to direct rendering calls.

Object Composition model

Michael Daines is looking to possibly separate PDF generation from the PDF object model. Essentially, this would allow you to do things like deal with Text objects directly. The motivation behind this is to make things highly abstract and make it easy for custom layout APIs to be mapped directly on top of Prawns primitives. Though this idea may show promise, my general opinion is that Prawn should stay simple and limit the amount of objects it uses. We'll see how this changes as development proceeds.

Encoding Issues

Even though we're heading towards using Type0 fonts with Identity-H encoding for strings in content streams, strings outside content streams (like those in the Info Dictionary, any bookmarks, annotations, etc) must be in PDFDocEncoding or UTF-16. UTF-16 is preferable from a i18n point of view, so I think we should use that.

They can still be in the <XX> format, so the basic Ruby string -> PDF String conversion is the same, it will just need some pre-processing to ensure it's in UTF-16.

"\xFE\xFF" + some_string.unpack("U").pack("n")

Hyperlinks

Steve Rogers suggests supporting links in documents. I'd need to look over the spec for how to support this.

Font Subsets

James Healy suggests supporting subsetting of TTF fonts (section 5.5.3 of the spec) to keep file sizes down.