Account Template Questions

[Christian Stimming]

Hi Tor,

linux at strigen.com schrieb:
> A couple of questions about accounts:

for avoiding ambiguities I'd call these files "account templates"...

> 1: I found the fault...(Why my norwegian accounts didn't work) The
> Conglomerate XML editor is cutting away the "gnc-act:" from the xml tags.
> (A bug i think... it does it with all the files it edits). An updated
> norwegian account list will be sent later. 

Ok. I saw an error message in the trace file /tmp/gnucash.trace, but it 
wasn't obvious which file was errorneous. I edit those files directly in 
(x)emacs, so I didn't have to deal with XML-editor behaviour before.

> Shouldn't there be an error
> issued when the account files are badly formed? (My accounts didn't show
> up at all, even if there was only one file that was wrong.)

Yes, maybe we should issue a better error message as an error dialog or 
on stdout, instead of only writing to /tmp/gnucash.trace, but I don't 
know how to fix that easily.

> 2: The account category "Full Chart" is showing up, but not the
> description, and it is not showing any accounts either. This is an exact
> copy from the /C folder. I cant see anything that is wrong with it
> either.... Can some experienced user have a look at it?

Do you mean this account template has been copied to the 
$datadir/gnucash/accounts/nb directory? From the files you submitted as 
a patch I didn't mark the accntchart_full for installation, only for 
inclusion in the tarball.

> 3: Why does my editors mess up the norwegian characters? I've seen it now
> with the conglomerate editor, and when i write a draft for my emails in an
> editor, and later send them to the list. (I've seen a couple of you
> "complain" about "strange" characters in the mails..

I'm afraid some of the account template files have contradicting 
encodings. The encoding of most account template files is something 
other than UTF-8 and IIRC the respective encoding (like "ISO-8859-1") is 
at least noted correctly in the very first line of the XML file. As long 
as the editor and gnucash's libxml2 honor this setting, they will 
correctly read the file.

But problems start if your XML editor ignores this setting and writes 
the Norwegian characters in "UTF-8", although the very first line of the 
XML file still claims that the file is in "ISO-8859-1". *If* your XML 
editor writes UTF-8, then you can fix the problem by changing the very 
first line of the XML file and specifying encoding="UTF-8".

Christian