Phil Longstaff wrote:
On July 21, 2009 04:35:17 pm Paul Kruger wrote:
NOTE TO DEVELOPERS...the program is great EXCEPT for poor invoice
capabilities which makes in not-usable for most businesses. There is no
way I can see any accountant trying to struggle with designing and printing
invoices with Gnucash unless he is also a graduate computer programmer.
Daisy the secretary will be totally lost.
This seems to have been an on going flaw in Gnucash re Printing and
Invoices. I can't imagine any business user being able to use Gnucash
given the current lack of development in this area. Printing an invoice is
a primary and most important function for any accounting program used in
business.
A personal home account user may never need to print an invoice. If that is
the only audience, this is ok.
I am trying to get rid of Windows and Quickbooks but absent any means to
set up a standard default invoice and print it, Gnucash falls far short on
that one account. It is a fatal flaw !
Everything else is in place and I like the program but it remains a no-go
until I can lay out my invoice and print it.
Suggestion:
Use standard HTML and CSS files for templates then place the code to print
the data where needed. That way almost anyone can edit templates or offer
various template designs for download for non-html people. You are already
set to output as html so why not use the same HTML as a template?
:teeth:
The advantage of gnucash being open-source is that anyone has the right to
take it and modify it to suit their needs. The person who wrote the business
section of gnucash did that. He designed the invoice to fit his needs and
provided anyone else the right to take that code and modify it.
The disadvantage of gnucash being open-source is that there is no marketing or
customer service organization which takes customer needs and feeds them to a
software team to develop the software. The versions that are released are
produced by volunteers who modify the software to scratch their particular
itches. For me, a gnucash developer, I have scratched my particular itches,
and if that helps other people scratch theirs, great. I personally don't care
about invoices, but if someone else wants to fix invoices, they are more than
welcome to pitch in.
Re your suggestion: someone has done what you suggest. 2.3.3 (maybe 2.3.2 as
well, I can't remember), an unstable version that will be released tomorrow or
Thursday, contains 1) webkit replacement for gtkhtml as the report display
engine 2) work by Chris Dennis to define an html/css template for an invoice
that includes embedded SCM code to insert the data. Since I'm the 2.3.X/2.4
release engineer, I've worked with him a bit to get it included in the release
so that people can try it. However, it's not my area of interest. If you
want to download it (I'm not sure if/how it can run in parallel with a current
2.2.X installation on windows) and test it out and provide feedback, I'm sure
Chris would be delighted.
There are instructions on using the new report templating system on the
wiki at
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/index.php?title=Custom_Reports_Using_Eguile
Making simple changes to templates can be as easy as changing HTML or
CSS/ But the templates also involve Guile (a dialect of Scheme) code
which handles the loops and conditions and accesses values from GnuCash,
so making bigger changes, or creating new reports, is still non-trivial.
I've tested the new system on 2.2.6 and 2.2.9 -- it's just a question
copying a few files to the right places, and editing the
.gnucash/config.user file.
The results on 2.2.x versions are good, but not as good as with the
CSS-capable Webkit system that is part of 2.3.2 and later versions.
So far I've created two new template-based reports -- an invoice and a
balance sheet. Hopefully people will start adding more -- I'll be happy
to help if they do.
cheers
Chris
--
Chris Dennis cgden...@btinternet.com
Fordingbridge, Hampshire, UK
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