ruby on rails - header and footer in Prawn PDF

Question

I have read through all relevant posts on Prawn but found no mentioning (even in Prawn's own documentation) of headers and footers.

However, I did see a demo on Prawnto's own website about headers and footers. I copied the entire source of that demo just to see if it works but an error of undefined method "header" is complained about. Am I to understand that Prawn took out header and footer recently in the gem or is there something else I need to do first to use header and footer?

The demo page: http://cracklabs.com/prawnto/code/prawn_demos/source/text/flowing_text_with_header_and_footer

the part of code of concern:

Prawn::Document.generate("flow_with_headers_and_footers.pdf")  do

  header margin_box.top_left do 
      text "Here's My Fancy Header", :size => 25, :align => :center   
  end   

  text "hello world!"
end

And by header, just in case, I mean the snippets of words that appear usually at a corner of every page of a document. Like your account number in your bills pages.

thanks!

Answer 1

The sample you are refering to, from the prawnto plugin, is using an older version of prawn.

Since i also needed header and footer i looked a bit more into this. It seems that that version of prawn had header and footer methods, which were implemented using lazy bounding box. (found by checking the code on github)

In the new prawn version you can do the same thing using repeaters.

Here is the full sample rewritten using the new version:

require "#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/../example_helper.rb"

Prawn::Document.generate("test.pdf")  do

   repeat :all do
    # header
    bounding_box [bounds.left, bounds.top], :width  => bounds.width do
        font "Helvetica"
        text "Here's My Fancy Header", :align => :center, :size => 25
        stroke_horizontal_rule
    end

    # footer
    bounding_box [bounds.left, bounds.bottom + 25], :width  => bounds.width do
        font "Helvetica"
        stroke_horizontal_rule
        move_down(5)
        text "And here's a sexy footer", :size => 16
    end
  end

  bounding_box([bounds.left, bounds.top - 50], :width  => bounds.width, :height => bounds.height - 100) do                 
   text "this is some flowing text " * 200    

   move_down(20)

   font "#{Prawn::BASEDIR}/data/fonts/DejaVuSans.ttf"
   table [["?αλον ?αγε?ν",    "baaar",             "1" ],
          ["This is","a sample",          "2" ],
          ["Table",  "dont
cha
know?",  "3" ],
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules
with an iron fist", "x" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],   
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],  
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ],     
          [ "It",    "Rules",             "4" ]],     

     :font_size          => 24, 
     :horizontal_padding => 10,
     :vertical_padding   => 3,
     :border_width       => 2,
     :position           => :center,
     :headers            => ["Column A","Column B","#"]

  end
end

you can check the documentation page of repeat for other options which allow you to exactly specify where you want the repeaters.