HexaPDFHexaPDF 0.9.0 - Document Layout Published on
With the ground work for document layout management done in the 0.8.0 release the focus was shifted to the refinement of these features and to the actual document layout functionality.
The major changes for this release are the document composition functionality, incremental PDF writing, a CLI command for splitting PDF files and compatibility with Ruby 2.6.
Document Composition
One of the goals of HexaPDF is to provide high-level functionality for document composition. With this release the initial working version of this goal has been achieved with the new HexaPDF::Composer class.
This class uses the functionality introduced in the last release (e.g. frames, text boxes, …) to make creating a PDF document as easy as it is with other libraries, for example Prawn. Here is a simple example:
require 'hexapdf'
HexaPDF::Composer.create('hello-world.pdf') do |pdf|
pdf.text("Hello World!", font_size: 50, align: :center, valign: :center)
end
Text (or more generally every box) is layed out from top-to-bottom and can be flown around objects that have been placed on the page before. This makes it easy, for example, to flow text around images (see the new composer example). Also, if some box doesn’t fit on a page or can’t be split, a new page is automatically created.
Arbitrary drawing operations can still be performed by using the HexaPDF::Content::Canvas object that is provided by the composer.
Incremental Writing
Starting with this version HexaPDF supports incremental writing. Writing a PDF document in incremental mode means that the new or changed content is just appended to the original PDF. This is used, for example, if the original document was cryptographically signed so as to not invalidate the signature.
Incremental writing in HexaPDF is not perfect in the sense that it doesn’t completely minimize the amount of data that gets written. The reason for this is HexaPDF’s automatic conversion of hash values. For example, PDF dates (which are stored as strings) are automatically converted to Ruby date objects on access, making the comparison fail even though there are no differences when serializing.
Splitting PDF Files
The hexapdf command line application already has a command for merging files but the reverse was
missing. So this version brings the split command that can do exactly that.
As an example, consider the following: hexapdf split input.pdf out_%02d.pdf. This would split the
input.pdf file page by page and generate files of the form out_01.pdf, out_02.pdf and so on.
Other Changes
There were some other changes and bug fixes, the most noteworthy are:
-
Usage of some non-described stdlib behaviour was fixed to make HexaPDF compatible with Ruby 2.6.
-
Text boxes now respect width/height/padding/border when fitting.
-
Variable width line wrapping now correctly considers line spacing when determining line width.
As always, have a look at the changelog for an overview of all changes.
And Happy New Year!