Spam:****, Re: Reports, probably again

[Colin Scott]

> Just because the reports are exported in HTML with Arial as the 
> font doesn't mean that's the way you have to print them.
> 
> For personal-informal reports I could see an argument for a more 
> finished form. But for business or organization reports? You would 
> want to take the data into your favorite editor where you would do 
> things like add the necessary footnotes, fixed text, etc. and 
> that's when you do the final formatting, selection of fonts, etc. 
> Did you want/expect the gnucash team to provide a full editor 
> (instead of letting you choose the editor). And what must the final 
> format be? A report filed with some governmental agency that 
> requires PDF?  A fancy printed annual report where you end with a 
> compositor  application like latex?

Your comments are in one sense absolutely spot on, and yet in another completely miss the point.

On the one hand, gnucash has a "pretty-print" format which is more or less OK for on-screen viewing by the operator, but in no sense suitable (as you suggest) for distribution to the Board.  This is fine, and - so far as it goes - not a problem.

However, when it comes to exporting the reports, all that pretty-print layout is actually exported along with the data (the format is, after all, HTML - presumably the same HTML used to pretty-print the screen!) which actively impedes attempts to process and lay-out the data in a finished form, and must be identified and discarded before serious work can begin.  Worse, since gnucash 2.3 at least the formatting information exported has actually destroyed columnar information, and so the task of the user wishing to layout reports properly is greatly - and entirely unnecessarily - increased.

The ideal format for report exports would be CSV, which contains *only* the data and columnar information, with no formating information to be discarded before processing, and leaves the user free to use his tools of choice to process and lay-out his reports with the minimum of effort.  Exporting as HTLM leaves the user with neither a properly formatted report nor clean data for him to format for himself.  It is this one aspect that is unsatisfactory.

An alternative might be to provide an interface that is realistically usable by one of the many freeware or commercial report-writer applications around, but given the extraordinarily complex schema for Gnucash data, and the correspondingly complex and obscure SQL needed to extract relevant information, it seems unlikely that this could be a realistic or practical proposition without a great deal of preparatory work in preparing views suitable for the purpose.

So, to your specific point

> Did you want/expect the gnucash team to provide a full editor 
> (instead of letting you choose the editor)

the answer must be "No - just to provide good clean data for the user to work with."

Colin