Ruby Mendicant : Prawn's First Release!

I’m happy to announce I just cut the first alpha release of Prawn. It is chock full of features, and since the release notes are fairly detailed with good links, I’ve just pasted them for your review after the cut.
But first, I have a few words that I couldn’t quite convince myself deserved a separate post:

On a somewhat sad note, this will be my last post to O’Reilly Ruby. Things are changing a lot behind the scenes here, and there has been a lot of re-shuffling of resources. I’ll still be blogging for O’Reilly but over on the News Site. However, since that blog will be a bit more ‘big story’ oriented, I’m going to also be starting up my own tech blog at majesticseacreature.com. Keep an eye out for that, but it may take me a few days to find time to write some blog software I can live with, and the page will be a ghost town until then.

So O’Reilly Ruby, So long, and thanks for all the fish. I had fun here and I hope that folks will still find my stuff over on the news site interesting.

Prawn 0.1.0 Release notes to follow…

Prawn : Fast, Nimble Ruby PDF Generator
Release Version 0.1.0                  

= Description:

Prawn is a new pure Ruby PDF generation library, with the long term goal of
providing a suitable replacement for PDF::Writer.  It is being developed
under the auspices of the Ruby Mendicant project with copious help from
a number of mighty fine contributors. 

= Features:   

This list isn't comprehensive, but Prawn has:                                                            

 * Elementary text and graphics operations
 * Support for built-in Adobe fonts (AFM)
 * Support for TTF embedding without the need to generate an AFM file
 * Automated page flow and text wrapping, with support for many page sizes
 * Basic text kerning support
 * Cool 'bounding box' concept that eliminates lots of coordinate math
 * m17n via UTF-8 text rendering (Auto-conversion of encodings on Ruby 1.9)
 * Support for JPEG and PNG image embedding (Including PNG Transparencies)
 * Growing spec suite (PDF::Reader based), and example set
 * Full Support for Ruby 1.9
 * Orders of magnitude faster than PDF::Writer for table generation

= News:   

After several non-release checkpoints, I've finally packaged up Prawn for your
alpha-testing enjoyment.  The Ruby Mendicant project will continue until
2008.09.16, which means I still have about 6 weeks of full time work available.

The next step is to get Prawn integrated into Ruport, but I estimate this will
only take a week or two.  After that, I will literally be working full time
implementing feature requests from our users until mid-September.  I will of
course continue to maintain the project after that, but now is your chance to
try things out and report problems / request features while there is still a
dedicated focus on this project.

Prawn is likely not yet ready for production, but is already useful for many
purposes.  Please report problems and make suggestions after trying this
release.   

= Install:

  gem install prawn

  Alternatively, you can clone the git repository with:

  git clone git://github.com/sandal/prawn.git

= Resources:   

  - Project webpage with basic overview and some examples / sample PDFs:
    http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com   

  - Github
    http://github.com/sandal/prawn 

  - Mailing List
    http://groups.google.com/group/prawn-ruby   

  - Bug Tracker / Wiki:
    http://prawn.lighthouseapp.com  

  - RubyForge Page:
    http://rubyforge.org/projects/prawn 

  - Prawnto, an unofficial Rails plugin for Prawn:
    http://cracklabs.com/prawnto 

There is also almost always a few people lurking / chatting in #prawn on
irc.freenode.net.  I am  there.

= Acknowledgements:

I will be putting together a comprehensive acknowledgments page some time
before the end of the Ruby Mendicant project, because there are so many people
who have helped me out in the last several months.  However, I'd like to send
special thanks to James Healy and Michael Daines who have done some really
critical work on the project and I'd be much farther behind without their
contributions.

= Until next time

Please enjoy Prawn and get in touch with suggestions!     

-greg