This howto covers seven approaches to generating a PDF document with Rails. HTMLDOC PdfWriter PDF::Writer (Austin Ziegler) Ruby FPDF JasperReports PDF Form Fill PDFlib and PDFlib-Lite Rfpdf Using HTMLDOC The sample code below requires HTMLDOC. #in controller def pdf @article = Article.find(@params["id"]) add_variables_to_assigns generator = IO.popen("htmldoc -t pdf --path \".;http://#{@request.env