Contributor: Akhlasur Rahman, Nascenia

Today I will write how to convert HTML to pdf. For this, we will use the wicked_pdf gem. It’s a nice gem to convert.

1. put this on your gem file

gem ‘wicked_pdf’, github: ‘mileszs/wicked_pdf’ gem ‘wkhtmltopdf-binary’

2. Then on the controller, you can write this(if u want to generate pdf file on the browser).

here you must define which template do u want to make pdf. here I write basic_infos/show.html.erb

respond_to do |format| format.html format.pdf do render :pdf => “file.pdf”, :template => ‘basic_infos/show.html.erb’ end end

———— OR ————

If u want to make force download link, you can write like this –

respond_to do |format| format.html format.pdf do @pdf = render_to_string :pdf => “mashpy”, :template => ‘basic_infos/show.html.erb’, :encoding => “UTF-8″ send_data(@pdf, :filename => “mashpy”, :type=>”application/pdf”) end end

3. You can put a download button like this –

<td><%= link_to ‘Download CV’, basic_info_path(basic_info, :format => :pdf) , :format => :pdf %></td> <td><%= link_to ‘Preview CV’, basic_info_path(basic_info) %></td>

4. on the template you have to embed CSS file using the wicked function. like this –

<%= wicked_pdf_stylesheet_link_tag “template1″ -%>

You can define your CSS file instead of template1

5. Also to show images on the pdf you have to use wicked_pdf_image_tag. here you can see I also used “to_s” function.

<% if @basic_info.avatar.present? %> <% if request.format == ‘application/pdf’ %> <%= wicked_pdf_image_tag @basic_info.avatar.to_s %> <% else %> <%= image_tag @basic_info.avatar.to_s %> <% end %> <% end %>

6. Then on the helper, you have to write like this –

def wicked_pdf_image_tag(img, options={}) if img[0].chr == “/” # images from paperclip new_image = img.slice 1..-1 image_tag “file://#{Rails.root.join(‘public’, new_image)}”, options else image_tag “file://#{Rails.root.join(‘public’, img)}”, options end end

By this process, you can easily convert HTML to pdf.