New reporting system (Re: Again font size when printing)

[two old]

 Hello Josh,

Please, bear with me I'm new to this type of developing so maybe I say
things that are stupid or offensive. Sorry for that.

First I agree a script should output content to a HTML template. The
template would secure the way my invoices or reports look on every update
of GnuCash or even an update of the script.

Second I don't know if and why the printing libraries should be
modernized. Maybe the printing libraries should be eliminated all
together. But that is not relevant for now. My thought on this is that
web-browser developers also put effort into developing printing
capabilities of there web-browser, so lets make use of that.

My idea is to do step one first and maybe step two later.

If we can make a script that put content into a HTML template and then
launch a web-browser to view and/or print it, this would be a huge step
forward.

Besides that, step one can be developed without interfering with the
printing libraries as they are now. I think ...........

Again I'm an end-user and a project manager as a profession so I'm
looking towards the end-result more that “the fun of doing it ourself”,
sorry :-)

So first of all I'm looking for an understanding of how this
printing/reporting/scripting business essentially works. I understand C
but I know nothing of Scheme. Nevertheless maybe I can make a start
......

Nicely printed invoices are important to me.

So any help on how to get started would be appreciated.

And as requested the follow up is limited to gnucash-devel.
I learn something new every day. :-D

Robert



  ----- Original Message -----
  From: "Josh Sled"
  To: "two old"
  Subject: Re: Again font size when printing (reporting system help!!!)
  Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 12:42:04 -0400 (EDT)


  On Thu, March 29, 2007 5:02 am, two old wrote:
  > It sounds like a challenge. Is there a place where I can read some
  of the
  > discussion about the reporting system and the thoughts the dev
  have?

  I think the IRC logs contain some of that, though we've not talked
  about
  it formally much. Over the years, I there are a few aspects that we
  agree
  on:

  - the reports should not have scheme scripts emitting HTML (i.e.,
  "(simple-format #f "

  ")" or even the "(gnc:html-p-element
  paragraph-content)" form we have now, but instead have a script that
  generates the report content, then applies it to a templated HTML
  file.

  - we should modernize our use of the printing libraries, especially
  as
  it's moved into gtk in recent times; some of this is already in
  progress.

  - (maybe optionally) allowing gecko would get a capable HTML
  rendering
  engine, importantly supporting CSS for both display and printing. As
  yelp
  already defaults to dep'ing against firefox/gecko, this shouldn't be
  a
  huge burden, but I understand that this is a problem for some people.
  I'm
  not sure that we care or have time to support both gecko and gtkhtml,
  however.


  I could add more detail, but I'm not sure what you're after, exactly.

  (We should probably limit followups to gnucash-devel.)

  --
  ...jsled
  http://asynchronous.org/