1.7.4 comments
Jonathan Corbet
lwn-gnucash@lwn.net
Mon, 02 Dec 2002 13:25:17 -0700
Hi, folks,
I thought I'd write up a quick piece in this week's LWN on the 1.8-to-be
release. So I pulled down 1.7.4. Things have come a long ways, congrats
are due to the developers. That said, here's a few comments. Please let
me know if I've missed something obvious...
- Installing gnucash hasn't gotten any easier over the years. I gave up
trying to install from source on my Debian unstable system. The RH 7.x
RPM, along with a gnucash.org g-wrap package, did the trick. (BTW, the
linas.org download area seems to be rather behind the times...)
- A default of "daily" for scheduled transactions does not seem
particularly useful. It's nice to see this feature find its way into
gnucash, but the interface seems a bit cumbersome, still. Some years ago
I used to use MS Money; it had a nice, one-at-a-time interface for
disposing of scheduled transactions. Why did gnucash go with a "make
several passes over the list" approach?
- Why no "twice a month" frequency for scheduled transactions? One can
fake it with two monthly transactions, but...
- Almost every gnucash window comes up too small on my system; I have to
resize them to see the full contents. In a bit of extra obnoxiousness,
the main window occasionally resizes itself into something really small.
- I get tons of complaints like:
The font "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-80-*-*-*-*-*-ISO8859-1" does not support all the required character sets for the current locale "en_US.iso885915"
(Missing character set "ISO8859-15")
(Missing character set "ISO8859-15")
Most things work fine anyway, but the "druid" windows come up blank.
There must be a way to tell it to look for a font it likes, but I
couldn't find it.
- The business features are a nice step in the right direction. But...why
can't I *type* a customer name when creating an invoice? How do I
customize the invoice format? I couldn't even find a way to get my own
address information into it, other than, perhaps, via a "logo" image.
- The documentation is good, as far as it goes. I can't find any
documentation of the new business features, though. I *think* its
definitions of "payable" and "receivable" accounts are reversed.
Don't take the above as indicative of how my article will read; there's a
lot of good stuff in this release and I will point it out.
Thanks,
jon
Jonathan Corbet
Executive editor, LWN.net
corbet@lwn.net