why gc invoices are not lacking

[Anonymous]

>The most important feature now in terms of business use is to
>automatically create an invoice in pdf, and to make it look "bloody
>fantastic" into the bargain.  It could even sport a "Invoice created
>by gnucash" by line.  One could certainly Print straight to a printer
>but a copy of the formatted Invoice could go to a nominated
>directory.  

Should gnucash be formatting documents?

I used to think that gnucash invoicing was severly limited and
lacking.  But after hacking around to circumvent the limitations, I've
found better tools for the job which are more specialized at what they
do.  Why reinvent functionality?  

LaTeX is the best formatting/typesetting tool in the world.  There is
a tool for extracting gnucash invoices and generating LaTeX code:

  http://stefans.datenbruch.de/gnucash/gc2latex.shtml

LaTeX gives great control over the cosmetics of the invoice, and the
results are impressive.

The other factor is standardization.  Should every finance tool
reconstruct code that produces a Belgian Credit Transfer Form, for
example?  A proper gnu philosophy is to have many tools each devoted
to a small job that it does well.  The LaTeX invoice.sty package would
ideally be made aware of how to format an invoice for each particular
region.

I would rather see gnucash improve on the ablity to import and export
data, to better leverage the efforts of other gnu projects.  The
gc2latex tool would ideally become included as an inherent part of
gnucash, so as to encourage users to exploit the power of latex.

FYI, a sample of the Belgian Credit Transfer Form is here:

  http://sepabelgium.be/fr/virement

Belgian invoices should have that at the bottom.  However, the
graphical construction of that should not be implemented by gnucash
developers.. it should be done by LaTeX developers.  GC developers
should only focus on smooth interoperability with latex.

>Emailing the invoice directly to a a customer would be outstanding.
>This is, in essence, my wish list.

If you were to use gc2latex, which you would most likely wrap with a
shell script, you could easily write the shell code to email the
invoice after pdflatex generates it.