Batch printing of invoices from gnucash

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Graham Leggett <minfrin at sharp.fm>:

> Derek Atkins wrote:
>
>> Unfortunately nothing now.  Patches welcome.
>
> Hmmm... it seems that gnucash' lack of automation is it's biggest 
> stumbling block for me at the moment, using it takes up way too much 
> time.

Hey, you get what you pay for.  Would you rather pay Intuit $300-500
and have to do everything in Windows?  ;)

> CashUtil seems to focus on inputs (enter this transaction, add this 
> vendor, etc), while there seems to be little or no support for 
> outputs just yet.

Indeed, and it's unlikely it ever will.  Cashutil was (is?) the side
project of a single developer working alone without any contact with
anyone else.

> How difficult would it be to teach the gnucash binary to run, load 
> headless, run one or more specified reports, outputting them as some 
> kind of useful output (pdf? html thatn can be converted to pdf 
> somehow?), and then exiting with a status code?

Honestly, I don't know.  The problem is that the reports are generated
as HTML and output through GtkHTML, and the PDF generation is performed by the
interaction of gtkhtml and gnome-print.  It's unlikely this would work
without a GUI.

> What sections of the code would be affected by this, in other words 
> what code should I be looking at?

Lots of stuff, unfortunately.  I don't even know where to point you at
to start, I'm afraid.

> Regards,
> Graham

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available