15.4. Creating PDF Documents with PDF::Writer

PDF::Writer is a library to create PDF documents in Ruby. It can be installed as a RubyGem or downloaded from RubyForge. Basic document creation is pretty simple:

require 'rubygems'
require 'pdf/writer'

pdf = PDF::Writer.new

15.4.1. Basic Concepts and Techniques

One of the primary issues facing any document designer is that of text fonts (or type-faces). PDF::Writer supports five basic fonts; the first three have bold and italic (or oblique) variants.

  • Times-Roman

  • Helvetica

  • Courier

  • ZapfDingbats

  • Symbol

If no font is selected, Helvetica will be used by default. When selecting a font, a character substitution table can be created, allowing normally nonprintable characters or code pages to be simulated. There ...

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