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Prawn lets Ruby developers build PDFs directly from code: you describe text, fonts, page layout, drawing, and images with Ruby operations. It is a good fit when you want precise control and are willing to own the layout logic. It does not render HTML or CSS into PDF.

What Prawn does—and what it does not

Prawn is a pure Ruby library for generating PDF documents. Instead of designing a page in HTML and asking a browser to print it, you write Ruby that places and styles content in the PDF. That makes Prawn flexible and composable: you can build reusable helpers around the document structures your application needs.

The tradeoff is that your code is responsible for layout decisions such as spacing, page breaks, and alignment. Prawn is not an HTML-to-PDF generator, reporting product, or complete publishing toolchain, although it can serve as a building block within a larger system. Its limited inline formatting is not intended for rich HTML documents.

Create a first PDF

Install the prawn gem in your application, then use Prawn::Document.generate to create a file. The block contains the operations that draw or place content:

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require "prawn"

Prawn::Document.generate("hello.pdf") do
  text "Hello World!"
end

This is the introductory pattern in the Prawn project documentation. For a real document, decide early on the page size, orientation, and margins so that every page and reusable component works from the same geometry.

Choose flowing or positioned content

Prawn offers different ways to place text. Flowing text participates in layout and can continue as space runs out; text boxes let you constrain text to a defined area. By contrast, draw_text positions text at a coordinate and baseline. It does not provide the same line-flow behavior as a text box.

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Page size, layout, margins, text flow, and drawing methods are documented in the Prawn 2.5.0 Document API. Prawn describes margins in points. When a design uses fixed coordinates, keep the coordinate system and baseline behavior in mind; for content whose length varies, flowing text or bounded text boxes are generally easier to manage.

Set typography and use custom fonts

Prawn can use built-in PDF fonts or external font files. Built-in fonts are convenient when their appearance and character repertoire suit the document. For a different typeface, provide a font file to font or register a family with separate files for the styles you use.

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Prawn::Document.generate("custom-font.pdf") do
  font "fonts/Example-Regular.ttf"
  text "A paragraph in a custom typeface."
end

For a family with multiple faces, register the files by style and select the family for text. The Document API documents family registration for normal, bold, italic, and bold-italic faces; the Prawn manual demonstrates passing a TTF path to font. Register only the styles your document actually needs, and verify that the files are available in the environment where the PDF is generated.

Handle UTF-8 and multilingual text carefully

Prawn expects UTF-8 text, but encoding alone does not guarantee that a chosen font contains every character. Select font files that include the glyphs required by your content, and configure fallback fonts where appropriate. Prawn documents fallback-font options and support for right-to-left text in its Document API and project documentation.

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Test the generated PDF with representative text from every script you expect to support. Check that glyphs render, line breaks and direction look right, and the result remains legible in the intended PDF viewer; do not assume a font covers an entire language simply because it renders basic Latin text.

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Build tables with the companion library

Table support comes from the companion prawn-table project rather than the core Prawn API. It provides table styling options, including repeated headers. When you need predictable alignment, set column widths explicitly: the table project notes that explicit widths can produce better results than automatic sizing.

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See the Prawn Table project for its API and options. Treat tables as another layout component to test with realistic content, especially when cells can wrap or vary in length.

Make document layouts reusable

Extract recurring elements—such as headers, footers, page labels, and common content blocks—into Ruby methods or modules. Prawn includes repeatable content features and a per-document extension mechanism, so application-specific helpers can sit above the lower-level drawing operations.

The Document API describes document extensions. The project also exposes access to the PDF object tree for specialized cases; that path is intended for developers comfortable with the PDF specification. Before relying on experimental APIs, check the release notes and lock the gem version used by your application: Prawn says it does not formally apply semantic versioning to every API and identifies experimental APIs as less stable. The cited API pages document Prawn 2.5.0; check the manual and release notes for the version you pin, since the current release and supported Ruby-version matrix are not established here.

When Prawn is the right fit

Choose Prawn when your application is already in Ruby and you want to express PDF layout as code, build custom drawing behavior, or create reusable document primitives tailored to your output. Consider an HTML-to-PDF approach instead when your source of truth is rich HTML/CSS and you need browser rendering. For complex publication workflows, assess whether you want to build and maintain layout behavior yourself or use a more complete publishing system. The available Prawn documentation establishes its scope and limits, but not a current performance comparison with alternatives.

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