Invoices in TeX [was: Re: Extra content added to printed invoices]

[Derek Atkins]

Quoting Thomas Witzenrath <thomas at witzenrath.com>:

> I have always felt, that a decent templating system is something that
> gnucash has yet to achieve to make it realy usable. I have been
> fighting those scheme files for quite some time now and have finaly
> found a different way to get my invoices printed. I hacked up a small
> python script, that will export your invoice-data directly from your
> gnucash file to a .tex-Template, since I felt TeX is a lot easier than
> scheme.. at least for me.. :-)

I've been saying for years that we should integrate something like
e-guile so that you would write a report as an HTML template with embedded
scheme functions.  Gnucash would then "run" the template and it would
output HTML.   e-guile is effectively a single source file.  I suspect
that integration into gnucash would take a relatively novice developer
maybe a week of time to do..

But here's where it gets better:  once we have an e-guile template system,
there's no reason you have to template HTML.  You could, theoretically,
template ANYTHING.  So you could generate a TeX template with embedded
guile and then run it through the gnucash e-guile process and viola,
you've now got a TeX generator!

Honestly, any decent software engineer should be able to learn scheme
syntax in under a day, and if they really work at it could learn most
of the rest of the semantics of the language in about a week.  It's
really not a hard language to learn -- why do you think they've been
using it to teach intro to CS classes for the past N decades?

I really encourage you (or SOMEONE) to take the initiative and integrate
e-guile!

-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