invoices the gnu way (was Re: why gc invoices are not lacking)

[team.gaming at gmx.de]

> Quickbooks and the like have the capability to produce professional
> looking invoices without first exporting to some other program.

Quickbooks reinvents capability, and embeds it.  It's wasteful.  It
keeps developers busy duplicating (and maintaining duplicated bits),
and then charging customers for this... when the effort is better
spent on new functionality or improving the quality of existing
modules.

Gnu tools obviate that.  The gnu approach enables cooperation and
integration that would be otherwise blocked by business constraints.
It would be reckless to needlessly toss out the advantage of division
of labor on a gnu tool.

> Installing LaTeX and figuring out how to put together the script,
> and learning how to change the template to get the invoice that
> actually meets the needs of a specific business really is not an
> answer.

Certainly for expert users, it's superior.  But as you say:

> It could become one if that were bundled with a GNUcash
> release (although that may stretch what makes sense in the context
> of GNUcash), and the necessary script were included, along with
> hooks to make the result not require any command line interactions.

Indeed.  Latex integration could be made trivial (in fact not even
noticable) for novice users.