Pdf generation with latex in rails 3

is there a way to generate pdf documents from latex in rails 3? We've been using rtex (http://rtex.r开发者_如何学运维ubyforge.org/) in a rails 2 application, however it doesen't seem to work with rails 3. Our rails application generates invoices using a latex template which we also use to create invoices by hand. Hence we would have to maintain two templates if we had to find a different solution for the pdf generation in rails 3.

Best I found to do such things was to create the .tex files on the server, then call a rake task that ran a "pdflatex" system command.

It is pretty poor in performances I guess, but it's designed for a single admin and works fine for me, on my local machine, and I can use the same latex templates for my letters

Old question, but I'm sure this'll help anyone coming to this page now.

Take a look at the rails-latex (LatexToPdf) gem.

The LatexToPdf.generate_pdf method takes in two arguments:

• tex content
• a configuration hash

...and returns the pdf binary, which you'll have to write to a file.

I suggest reading through the source to if you need to add configuration.

Note that under the hood, the rails-latex gem still depends on a TeX extension (which you'll need to download) to generate the pdf. The default is pdflatex, and I've personally used xelatex.

As of the writing of this answer, this gem is described as a renderer for rails 3; though it now includes support for rails 4 and 5.