why gc invoices are not lacking

[Mark Hanford]

On 15 September 2013 20:40, Anonymous <nobody at frog.aanmy.com> wrote:
>>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.
> _______________________________________________

Depends on if the GC community wants non-developers using GC
effectively. There's no need for ANY wysiwyg software at all, and yet
they're oddly prevalent.