Austin Ziegler has a great introduction to Creating Printable Documents with Ruby over at Artima. His article is part of the new Ruby Code & Style online journal. Austin covers all of the basics in his article and, though I had to recompile ruby for Mac OS X, I was able to get through all of the examples. One thing that disappointed me about PDF::Writer was that it only supports JPG and PNG images (and for PNG only 8-bits images are supported). For my usage, I found the section on partial document generation the most useful since I have to generate bills from Ruby on Rails by modifying a standard boiler-plate letter. If you’re interested in using FPDF instead, Robby has a good overview on generating PDF documents from an ERb template.