After all, LaTeX is an older technology that can be relatively hard to learn, particularly compared
with Ruby. However, LaTeX has two large advantages over the alternatives: it??™s fast, and it??™s
flexible. LaTeX can perform a huge array of PDF-formatting tasks??”ranging from automatic page numbering,
to footnotes, to mathematical formulas, to printing address labels??”and it can create even very
large PDF reports quickly.
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On the othe hand, as mentioned, LaTeX is not the most user-friendly tool. If you??™re looking for
another solution, you can try two other PDF-generation techniques demonstrated in this book:
??? Converting HTML to PDF is an easy technique to use, as the source is HTML. However, you don??™t
have detailed control over your formatting, since HTML is a very different format from PDF. This
technique is demonstrated in Chapter 8.
??? Using PDF::Writer is more flexible than HTML-to-PDF conversion, but slower and less flexible than
LaTeX. However, PDF::Writer is written in pure Ruby, so if you pefer to use a pure Ruby library
with no external dependencies, that??™s the way to go.
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