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# Goals for Prawn 1.0

In this talk at LoneStarRuby Conf 2009, Gregory Brown discusses the objectives and ongoing development of Prawn, a Ruby library for generating PDF documents. Brown reflects on the project's origins and current status, providing insights into the features planned for the future release of Prawn 1.0.

## Key Points Discussed:
- **Introduction to Prawn**: Brown begins by engaging the audience about their familiarity with Prawn, highlighting its use as a PDF generation tool that is built entirely in Ruby.
- **Development Challenges**: Acknowledging a mishap with his presentation slides, Brown shares that while the project has faced slowdowns due to his return to work, the team has continued to write code.
- **Goals for Prawn 1.0**: Key features being pursued for the 1.0 version include:
  - A high-level interface for generating basic reports with a focus on ease of use and efficiency.
  - Full Unicode support and automation of transcoding for Ruby 1.9 users, as well as maintaining support for Ruby 1.8.6 and above.
  - The intention to replace PDF Writer, addressing its performance issues by creating an API compatibility layer that eases the transition for users.
  - Enhancing the library's core implementation to be more readable and maintainable, drawing from best practices in software design.
- **Technical Challenges**: Brown outlines challenges related to the complexity of the PDF specification and the management of object systems within PDFs. He cites the need for improvements in handling pointers across pages and mentions ongoing work to tackle these issues.
- **Community Involvement**: The success of Prawn is attributed to its 40 contributors, which showcases the collaborative nature of open-source development. Brown emphasizes the importance of maintaining the independence of Prawn from third-party packages.
- **Conclusion and Future of Prawn**: The talk concludes with Brown inviting questions from the audience, indicating that there are plans to release a book on the subject and aims to make key aspects open-source by March 15.

Overall, Brown urges the audience to engage with Prawn, suggesting they can collaborate or ask questions about its development as the team continues to enhance the library as they approach the official release of version 1.0.

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