Reports again

[James Wilde]

On Aug 30, 2011, at 23:28 , David T. wrote:

> Personally, I wouldn't recommend using Fink or Macports to run Gnucash on OS X nowadays. Been there, done that, and found it a real challenge.

That's not what bothers me.  It's that my days of compiling and installing are over now.
> 
> My experience (I've been using Gnucash on my Mac for something like 5 years now) is that the Mac dmg download has worked consistently well for some time, due in large part to the gargantuan efforts of John Ralls. It is by no means an "alpha" product as you suggest. With (as far as I know) just a few known issues, it works just fine.

I agree that John Ralls does a herculean job for Mac owners, and all credit to him.   He has patiently helped me with queries on several occasions.  But he needs help, and unfortunately, by the nature of the Mac, it's that much harder for him to get it.  What I meant by my comment on an alpha product was that, by comparison with the finished product under linux, my experience was that the Mac offering has a very long way to go, and it's on the output side, not the input side.

Fortunately I'm sufficiently technical to have Virtualbox on my Mac, and there I can run a linux virtual machine in a Mac window, and there I can have GC in the environment for which it was created.  I can, if I want, transfer reports back to the Mac, and work with them there, but I don't think I need to.

20 mins later:

However, now I think I must eat crow.  I have just gone back to the Mac version and I find that, with one very minor exception*, it now appears to be working as I want it to work.  Since I haven't altered anything in GC Preferences, I can only assume that it is my adjustments to the locale settings on the Mac which have done this.  I now have good-looking reports both on screen and after export to LibreOffice Calc, and the big thing is that the value columns in Calc now suddenly _are_ value columns, and no longer text fields.  So I withdraw wholeheartedly my criticism of GC on the Mac.  The problem appears to be one of pilot error in connection with configuring the Mac for my locale, and I apologise to all those, John and all  his colleagues, who have ported this excellent product so well to what, at the moment, is still my favourite operating system.

//James

* The exception is that the GC Preference function to set the report font doesn't seem to work, but the font I have now, having eliminated html links, is good enough.

> 
> On Aug 30, 2011, at 18:51 , Mike Alexander wrote:
> 
> > --On August 30, 2011 9:03:15 AM +0200 James Wilde <james.wilde at sunde-wilde.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> Mike, I'll be glad to try this if you can give me a link to
> >> instructions and a download since, as you describe it, it sounds as
> >> though there is a  separate download, which one then opens in an X11
> >> window.
> > 
> > The GnuCash project doesn't provide a prebuilt X11 version of Gnucash (for any OS).  If you want that you have to build it from source or install it using a package manager for your OS.  For OSX perhaps the easiest way to install it would be to use MacPorts (see <http://www.macports.org/>).  I haven't done this for a while, but it looks like things are up to date there and it should be fairly easy to build and install it.  The tricky part is getting all the prerequisites installed and MacPorts handles this for you.  Since MacPorts will build everything from source (or almost everything) it will take a while. The MacPorts project just added support for installing prebuilt binaries, but I don't think many things are available in that form yet.
> > 
> > You also have to get X11 installed, but a usable version comes with OSX.  You can install a more recent version using MacPorts or from <http://xquartz.macosforge.org/>.
> 
> Thanks for the info, Mike, but I'm going to pass on this one.  Back in the days when solaris and linux were my operating environments, it was natural - necessary even - to have a full development environment on the machine and as often as not compile and install from source.  However, nowadays the Mac is a working tool rather than a development environment.  Besides, leaving the Mac interface, aqua as you call it, in favour of X11, is not why I'm using the Mac.  An X11 window might be another thing.
> 
> //James
> 
> 
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