This is a tool that I wrote to lay a grid over PDF files.

I was working on an app that adds text boxes to PDFs using Prawn and CombinePDF. I got frustrated with the guess-and-check method to find the right coordinates.

Given a PDF that looks like this:

It will make this:

This can be installed with RubyGems:

gem install gridify_pdf

This is primarily intended to be used as a CLI tool

This will read the file at document.pdf and output a version with a grid overlay at gridified_document.pdf.

gridify_pdf document.pdf gridified_document.pdf

You can also have the PDF written to a temporary file and opened in your default PDF viewer:

gridify_pdf document.pdf --open

If, for some reason, you want to use this tool in your own code, that is also possible:

require 'gridify_pdf'

input = File.read('input.pdf')
result = GridifyPdf::Gridifier.new(input).gridify
File.write('output.pdf', result)