Prawn

The recommended way to read Prawn's documentation is to view it locally on your own machine. You can do this by cloning our git repositories, by unpacking your gems, or by running a gem server. Online documentation can be out of date, or may be written against a version that you are not actually running on your machine. Local documentation is much less likely to lead you astray.

For Lazy People

We do have some documentation online, but it's really only meant to be a convenience for those who don't understand how to get local documentation working properly. Please don't complain if it is out of date.

Prawn 0.8.4

This is the most recent gem version of Prawn, but is actually quite out of date. Users should be trying our development snapshots to prepare for Prawn 1.0. However, since a lot of folks likely have 0.8 code in production, we support it still.

Prawn 0.8 is split out into three packages prawn-core, prawn-layout, and prawn-security

This is a confusing situation that has been resolved in our development snapshots, but if in doubt, look in prawn-layout for table stuff, and in prawn-core for almost everything else.

Prawn 0.10.2

This is the latest development snapshot as of 2010.06.30. Because we merged prawn-core, prawn-layout, and prawn-security, all of your documentation is finally in one place. View the 0.10.2 API docs here.

Recommended Approach

RubyGems includes with it a server for hosting gems, which also can host up documentation. To use it, just run:

  gem server

Point your browser at http://localhost:8808 and you'll find an index of all installed gems, including Prawn. If this doesn't work or you prefer not to run a gem server, follow the manual instructions below.

Manually building docs for Prawn 0.8.4:

To get the source, you can clone the sandal/prawn, sandal/prawn-layout and madriska/prawn-security repositories from Github, or you can unpack your gems like this:

  gem unpack prawn-core
  gem unpack prawn-layout
  gem unpack prawn-security

Once you have the source, you can run the following command in each project directory to generate your documentation:

  rdoc lib/

For all the gory details on how RDoc works, check out this page.

Manually building docs for Prawn 0.9+:

The development snapshots of Prawn (currently 0.10.2 at the time of writing, are distributed via git-only. The good news is that prawn-core, prawn-layout, and prawn-security have all been merged into a single repository. The bad news is that we don't necessarily guarantee the documentation will be up to date or complete between now and 1.0.

However, you are still encouraged to manually build docs as needed, and the approach used for 0.8.4 will work for later versions of Prawn as well. Should you build your own gem, you only need to unpack the prawn gem to get at the source for the whole library. Otherwise, checkout whichever tag matches the version of Prawn you're using and follow the 0.8.4 instructions.

Having Problems?

If you are having trouble getting the docs to build, think you've spotted an error in our documentation, or want to contribute documentation patches, please contact us on the Prawn mailing list. Improving documentation is a top-priority for us on our path to 1.0, and as you can see, it's an area where we could really use some help.