This month, we had another fun an informative meetup at Coroutine. Just one presentation this time, but a good one:

Generating Word Documents with Caracal

John Dugan gave us a great walkthrough of Caracal. It’s an open source library for generating Microsoft Word documents with an HTML-like Ruby API. Caracal lets you build word documents like this:

Caracal::Document.save 'example.docx' do |docx|
            # page 1
            docx.h1 'Some Title'
            docx.hr
            docx.br
            docx.h2 'Some Section'
            docx.p  'Lorem ipsum dolor....'
            docx.br
            docx.table @my_data, border_size: 4 do
              cell_style rows[0], background: 'cccccc', bold: true
            end
          
            # page 2
            docx.page
            docx.p  'Lorem ipsum dolor....'
            docx.ul do
              li 'Item 1'
              li 'Item 2'
            end
            docx.br
            docx.img image_url('graph.png'), width: 500, height: 300
          end
          

The review demonstrated the library’s functionality but also a good portion of the libraries internal architecture.

The overall response was very positive. Caracal appears to be a well thought out library. It has a great API, and it’s internals abide by the principles of SOLID.

Thanks to all who came, and to Coroutine for the food and meeting space.