Fwd: World friendlier printable invoices

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Josh Sled <jsled at asynchronous.org>:

>> Just for the record, and because, as you point out, this has been
>> repeated several times...
>>
>> I agree that the solution is an html templating system.  However,
>> there are many better examples than eguile, if one is willing to use
>> a scripting language other than guile.
>>
>> I, for one, would not recommend anyone actually attempt to integrate
>> e-guile, as that is essentially equivalent to writing and maintaining
>> our own templating system.  Also, I think it's very unlikely that anyone
>> will ever get it to do anything impressive.
>
> I strongly agree with this, on all points.

That's fine.  I don't have a strong opinion..  But honestly, have you
looked at e-guile?  It's like 100 lines of scheme code, if that.
http://woozle.org/~neale/src/eguile is the main site, which points
to http://woozle.org/~neale/src/scheme/eguile.scm for the actual meat
of the code.

Basically, we would need to copy-and-paste that code into gnucash,
and then write a report wrapper around it that loaded the proper
runtime environment for the report template.

I don't see why it's so bad to have our own templating system.  Or maybe
what you mean and what I mean are completely different things?

>> Instead, if there is anyone interested, I would recommend that they
>> adapt the swig .i files to the popular scripting language of their
>> preference, and use the popular templating system of their choice.
>> This is a far better engineering decision, IMO, and far easier to do,
>> also.  It's probably about 80 hours work to the initial working system
>> for someone already familiar with the relevant tools.

I suspect the eguile work is much less than 80 hours.  Honestly, if I
actually had the time I bet I could do it in about a day.  The real work
is writing the report-code that takes the template file, sets up the
pointer to the GncInvoice* and then runs the template (or complains when
there is an error).

> While certainly people are free to do as they will, I think it makes sense to
> have a rational discussion about the particular language/templating system.
>
>> If I only had the time...
>
> I strongly agree with this, too. :/

Yeah..  :-(

-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
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