HexaPDF 0.33.0 - Table Support Published on Thursday, 03 August 2023

This release contains many different changes and fixes. The highlight, however, is the support for tables.

Table Implementation

The biggest change in this release is the addition of HexaPDF::Layout::TableBox which allows the creation of fixed width tables:

With this addition creating a table becomes very easy:

require 'hexapdf'

HexaPDF::Composer.create('table.pdf') do |composer|
  composer.table([['This', 'is'], ['a', 'table']], column_widths: [100, 100])
end

The table implementation supports

• one or more boxes of any type inside a table cell,
• header and footer rows,
• column and row spans, as well as
• easy styling of the whole table, rows, columns or individual cells.

There is also a new table benchmark which shows that HexaPDF is outperforming Prawn with the prawn-table gem.

Website Overhaul

The website got an overhaul and looks a bit (just a bit) different now. The changes were made to make the website feel more coherent in terms of styling and colors. Here are before and after images where this can be seen:

The documentation pages have also been enhanced with more sample PDFs. While the former version had 183 PDFs created with HexaPDF during the website generation, the current version has 237, so about 30% more!

Other Notable Changes

There was a bit of work making HexaPDF faster and use less memory. This can be seen in the line wrapping benchmark where the low-level version and the HexaPDF::Composer version are now nearly on par. Another change reduced the number of Fiber instances which greatly improves HexaPDF performance on TruffleRuby.

The API documentation of many classes has also been updated and enhanced. This is an ongoing process which will see all API documentation being updated.

As always, have a look at the changelog for an overview of all changes.