PDFkit doesn't display pictures in PDF

Question

Rails 2, PDFkit 0.5.0

Im generating a PDF from a View in Rails 2 with PDFkit and everything works fine. The only thing which doesn't work is displaying pictures in the pdf.

When I look at the View in the Browser, the picture is there but its missing in the PDF. There is only a placeholder existing in the PDF.

The image_tag is looking like this:

<%= image_tag('plus.gif') %>

I also tried to realize it with a css-file but it doesn't work either.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Because of the way that wkhtmltopdf works you need to specify the full path to any assets (JS, CSS, images etc), including the domain name.

This won't work:

<img src="/images/foo.png" />

This will:

<img src="http://example.com/images/foo.png" />

One workaround is to set an explicit asset host, even if it's the same server as your app is running on (see the AssetTagHelper documentation for details). Another would be to specify the hostname in the image_tag.