Quick Solutions: Rails 3, send_data, and garbled PDF output

This is just a quick blog entry to help anyone experiencing garbled PDF output (in Safari) when using Rails 3's send_data to output dynamically-generated PDF files. 

If you are following the documentation, then you are probably outputting something like this:

    send_data data, :filename => "myfile.pdf",
                          :type => 'application/pdf'

I don't know if this is specific to Rails 3, but the issue is that the Content-Type header is not being set to 'application/pdf', so setting it explicitly in the response should fix this issue:

    response.headers["Content-Type"]='application/pdf'
    send_data data, :filename => "myfile.pdf",
                          :type => 'application/pdf'