Invoices

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:10:20 -0400
Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> dijo:

> John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> writes:

> > 1) I set the font in Edit > Preferences > Printing, but GnuCash is
> > still using the ugliest font ever designed for the invoices. I can't
> > find the setting for invoices. I hope that miserable font is not
> > hard-wired. Can I change it? Also, is there any way to set the point
> > size differently for various sections of the invoice?

> Which Invoice report are you using?

I used the instructions for "Changing the Invoice Appearance" on the
Tutorial and Concepts Guide. It said I had to set it to Fancy in order
to make changes, so that is what I did. I'm using 2.2.6 on Ubuntu
Jaunty. 

> Unfortunately GtkHTML doesn't really let you set fonts..   In 2.4
> we'll have a templatized Invoice available which should help significantly.

I see from the main GnuCash website that 2.3.1 was released on June 7.
Is there a page somewhere that gives a guesstimate of the timeline for
2.4?

Thanks for the other news, even if it is not what I wanted to hear. At
least I can stop trying to fix the invoice in GnuCash and try to figure
out workarounds. I have to do something, because the current GnuCash
invoices are just unacceptable.

Fortunately I do not need to send a lot of invoices. My sales are all
to university bookstores where each order is 20-40 copies. I make only
seven or eight sales a month, so I don't need a lot of invoices.

I am already thinking of a way around the issue. I can produce the
GnuCash invoice and copy and paste off the GnuCash screen into a
document in another program such as OpenOffice.org Writer. In Writer I
can set up a template any way I want it. In fact, I just did it and I
can see that it will work great. In Writer I can record a macro to
paste special as unformatted text, then reformat and make all the
changes that I want. So the whole operation is just 1) select all in
the GnuCash screen, 2) open a new document in Writer based on the
template, 3) run the macro, 4) print and mail to customer or export as
PDF and e-mail to customer.

In fact, I think I'll always export to PDF and use that as the record
of what I sent to the customer. I can macro the export to PDF as well.
GnuCash will still have the invoice in its own file, so the accounting
data will be unaffected by the trip through OpenOffice.org.