iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Released #HexaPDF 1.11.0 with support for creating LTV digital signatures. hexapdf.gettalong.org/documentatio...

hexapdf.gettalong.org

Changelog - HexaPDF

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

This year's Euruko in Brno draws near. See you there next week! I will have some HexaPDF stickers with me 😁

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

No, there is no support for the proprietary and deprecated XFA format.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

For Ruby you have HexaPDF which is pure Ruby and can fill PDFs.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Feel free to contact me if you intend to use HexaPDF for the job and need help.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It depends greatly on what the content of the PDF is, i.e. just pure text vs also contains many tables vs contains many high-res images. If you modify hexapdf.gettalong.org/examples/pdf... to run the body 1000 times, it takes 16s with 400MB RAM on my machine, producing a 2.8MB file with 2000 pages.

hexapdf.gettalong.org

PDF/A Conformance - HexaPDF

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

PDF now supports Brotli compression through a new extension: pdfa.org/no-excuses-b... And #HexaPDF already has it implemented 😀

pdfa.org

No excuses: Brotli compression advances PDF – PDF Association

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Reposted by Thomas Leitner

Vienna.rb @ruby.wien · 05/08/2026

Save the date! Vienna.rb is back with incredible talks and great vibes! See you at Platogo on the 3rd of September! ✌️

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

#HexaPDF 1.9.0 with support for HarfBuzz text shaping released! hexapdf.gettalong.org/news/2026/he...

hexapdf.gettalong.org

HexaPDF 1.9.0 - Text shaping et al. - HexaPDF

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Coming to #HexaPDF with the next release: HarfBuzz based text shaping! First line in image without, second one with HarfBuzz based text shaping.

Screenshot of a PDF created by HexaPDF where the first line shows text with combining marks without correct shaping and the second line with correct shaping by HexaPDF's upcoming HarfBuzz support.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

I just released #HexaPDF 1.7.0, with support for smart text extraction and the upcoming brotli compression filter, among other things. hexapdf.gettalong.org/documentatio... hexapdf.gettalong.org/documentatio...

hexapdf.gettalong.org

Changelog - HexaPDF

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Reposted by Thomas Leitner

Vienna.rb @ruby.wien · 09/02/2026

Time for another Vienna Ruby Meetup! 🎉 It's been three months since the last meetup. To make up for it, we got three wonderful talks covering a wide range of topics this time. Thank you to Meister for hosting us!

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Released #HexaPDF 1.4.1 with some fixes - see hexapdf.gettalong.org/documentatio...

hexapdf.gettalong.org

Changelog - HexaPDF

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

You can't generally use an embedded font to add new content (because it usually misses parts in the font data structure; even if usable it might be missing characters). Viewers work around this by loading the same font from the system paths. With HexaPDF you need to specify the font yourself.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Yes! But did you know that you can even parse arbitrary strings? 😆 Example: github.com/gettalong/he... (used for interleaving and handling file names and options).

github.com

hexapdf/lib/hexapdf/cli/merge.rb at master · gettalong/hexapdf

Versatile PDF creation and manipulation for Ruby. Contribute to gettalong/hexapdf development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

* KDE lets you configure which short-cut switches between applications (ALT-Tab) and which between their windows (Alt-`). * The built-in KDE krunner application is sufficient as launcher for my needs. * Clipboard history just works in KDE. * Vim GUI -> gvim

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

If you are using KDE, you should be able to just configure this system-wide for all KDE based apps.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Or just use BreakVer www.taoensso.com/break-versio... and break things like before 😁

taoensso.com

BreakVer | Taoensso

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

So, I now have implemented a basic template system for VersaDok. However, using ERB as preprocessor instead of the built-in template system is faster in most cases (even though the larger source doc needs to be parsed every time) because AST nodes need to be rendered many times more.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Thanks for the great meetup! And thanks to @hansschnedlitz.com for organizing it and doing the cool Ruby quiz!

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

And now the code is available at github.com/gettalong/ve... It is not yet finished and not really polished etc. but already in a good state. This will be the basis for still more easily creating PDF documents with HexaPDF 😀

github.com

GitHub - gettalong/versadok: Versatile document creation markup and library

Versatile document creation markup and library. Contribute to gettalong/versadok development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Worked now! And just released the new version - see hexapdf.gettalong.org/documentatio...

hexapdf.gettalong.org

Changelog - HexaPDF

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Once rubygems.org sends me the password reset e-mail that I already requested a few times, I can release a new version of #HexaPDF

rubygems.org

RubyGems.org | your community gem host

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Array#[]=(e.g. ary[-10, 10] = EMPTY_ARRAY) won't create an additional array but is slower then Array#pop, so I'm staying with the latter.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

So I have been working on something lately, lightweight markup related. Turns out it's at least 4 times faster than kramdown when parsing the same document (n.b. a bit of an apple to banana comparison as kramdown can do much more at the moment but still 🤯)

Without YJIT on Ruby 3.4.1

Warming up --------------------------------------
kramdown 259.422 i/s - 270.000 times in 1.040775s (3.85ms/i)
versadok 1.158k i/s - 1.265k times in 1.091970s (863.22μs/i)
Calculating -------------------------------------
kramdown 276.681 i/s - 778.000 times in 2.811901s (3.61ms/i)
versadok 1.138k i/s - 3.475k times in 3.052762s (878.49μs/i)

Comparison:
versadok: 1138.3 i/s
kramdown: 276.7 i/s - 4.11x slower

With YJIT on Ruby 3.4.1

Warming up --------------------------------------
kramdown 334.871 i/s - 336.000 times in 1.003372s (2.99ms/i)
versadok 1.853k i/s - 1.969k times in 1.062396s (539.56μs/i)
Calculating -------------------------------------
kramdown 315.374 i/s - 1.004k times in 3.183520s (3.17ms/i)
versadok 1.822k i/s - 5.560k times in 3.052272s (548.97μs/i)

Comparison:
versadok: 1821.6 i/s
kramdown: 315.4 i/s - 5.78x slower

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Ah, I forgot up that - thank you! You can further optimize it by using a constant empty array and doing `array[from, size] = EMPTY_ARRAY`. I did a benchmark comparing pop, slice! and your method using benchmark-driver. Interestingly pop was faster even though it creates arrays.

The benchmark YAML file for benchmark-driver

Warming up --------------------------------------
pop 5.802M i/s - 6.040M times in 1.041085s (172.36ns/i, 187clocks/i)
slice! 4.235M i/s - 4.459M times in 1.052689s (236.11ns/i, 625clocks/i)
[]= 5.158M i/s - 5.168M times in 1.001836s (193.86ns/i, 211clocks/i)
Calculating -------------------------------------
pop 5.946M i/s - 17.406M times in 2.927538s (168.19ns/i, 426clocks/i)
slice! 4.100M i/s - 12.706M times in 3.098945s (243.90ns/i, 738clocks/i)
[]= 5.415M i/s - 15.475M times in 2.857926s (184.68ns/i, 808clocks/i)

Comparison:
pop: 5945557.8 i/s
[]=: 5414702.4 i/s - 1.10x slower
slice!: 4100124.2 i/s - 1.45x slower

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

So, Ruby friends, how do I remove count number of trailing elements from an array *without* creating a new result array? There is Array#pop(count) but that creates an array I don't need or want ;-)

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

@itext.bsky.social Congrats on the release of 9.1! 🎉 The table rendering speed-up is great! Is the source code for the benchmark available somewhere?

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Coming with the next release to #HexaPDF: Line annotation appearance generation. Other annotation types will follow.

Image of 10 line annotations with different styles

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Can also recommend weasyprint if you need HTML/CSS -> PDF. If you want more quality and better conversion, a commercial solution based on PrincePDF is available via www.europdf.eu And a heads up from me: There will be a markup-to-PDF pipeline for HexaPDF in the near future :-)

europdf.eu

EuroPDF - create PDFs from HTML, fast and secure!BASH_logo-transparent-bg-bw

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

It seems that Ruby getting faster with each release is now the norm. As no one is pointing it out anymore 😀

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

New release of hexapdf-extras to make it compatible with HexaPDF 1.0. The API docs now also have a visual example of a Swiss QR bill - hexapdf-extras.gettalong.org/api/HexaPDF/...

hexapdf-extras.gettalong.org

HexaPDF Extras: HexaPDF::Extras::Layout::SwissQRBill

Additional functionality for the HexaPDF library

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

I use unary + for normal UTF-8 encoded strings and "literal".b for binary ones.

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Reposted by Thomas Leitner

Eric Wastl @was.tl · 30/11/2024

🎄 T-24 hours until #AdventOfCode 2024! 🎄

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Yes, I also think so. When I wanted to formulate the versioning scheme for HexaPDF, I came across BreakVer 🙂

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Understood 😆 I also kept HexaPDF on 0.x versions for a long time (8 years) but decided to change it to 1.0 this October, now following BreakVer instead of SemVer.

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Thomas Leitner @gettalong.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

What do you do in case of breaking changes? Just a highlighted entry in the changelog? I have found that BreakVer (www.taoensso.com/break-versio...) is the versioning scheme I'm most comfortable with.

taoensso.com

BreakVer | Taoensso

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