Email Invoices

[Neil Williams]

On Monday 16 August 2004 7:23, Robert Uhl wrote:
> Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> writes:
> > IMHO the hard part is generating the MIME message and including the
> > PDF (or HTML) of the invoice.
>
> Why generate PDF or HTML mail when ASCII text would suffice?  Easy to
> generate, readable anywhere, attractive & with small file sizes!

I would normally agree about other email content, but invoices are official 
documents of a sort and should be printable upon receipt - they often have to 
be kept for several years and very few companies in my field have reliable 
digital archives. I send queries via email and correspondence, but an invoice 
would go as an attachment of a finished document, ready for printing. 
Probably PDF if I was emailing it to a large-ish organisation (i.e. not 
someone using dial-up). HTML is particularly unreliable for documents - it 
was never designed for this, despite numerous export filters - even if I get 
all technical with CSS2 page media types, absolute positioning, page breaks, 
same fonts at both ends, etc., there's very little to say that the invoice 
will look anything like the original when it is printed in someone else's 
browser.

I still like the original idea - print to a PS file and attach the file. Print 
to a PDF if you like. Isn't adding an email client a bit of a distraction 
from the main objective of GnuCash? I can't see many users not having an 
existing, preferred, email client with all their config and address books. It 
seems a waste for users to have to import their address book and email 
settings when all that is already available.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.codehelp.co.uk/
http://www.dclug.org.uk/
http://www.isbn.org.uk/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/

http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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