Invoice - Custom Design Header for No. 9 Double Window Envelope

R. Victor Klassen rvklassen at gmail.com
Thu Mar 19 21:05:51 EDT 2015


I respectfully disagree.  There have been far too many rants on this list about why you should never get anything more than data out of GnuCash and do all your formatting elsewhere.

I could live with direct cvs output that I then can manipulate with awk/perl or what have you and then pull into a spreadsheet for final formatting.  But that would only be a slight improvement, since it is one slightly less manual operation.  Then I could have something closer to an automated pipeline to take it the whole way through.   As it is, I’m doing a copy-paste into a spreadsheet, and then formatting it from there.  At that point the formatting is an entirely manual process.  Half way through I might notice I missed an account - it got added this year, and wasn’t selected in the report.  So I get to go back, fix it and copy-paste again.  Or just when I think I have it all, someone shows up with a missing (cash) receipt, so it gets put in and the whole report needs to be redone. Lather, rinse, repeat.

There’s the report from which I derive the contents of the tax form.  Then there’s the report for the bank.  And then there’s the report for internal consumption.  Some accounts are suppressed in each of these.   And every time I find something that doesn’t seem right I have to go back to the source to fix the original in GnuCash.

The Unix approach of one good tool to do only one thing well is fine and dandy, but first off, there are far too many Quicken/Quick books/Peachtree refugees out there using GnuCash that don’t know Unix tools inside and out and can’t write the scripts to convert HTML to troff or LaTeX, and secondly, I would maintain that the rest of the ideal pipeline to take the output of GnuCash and reformat it aren’t really all that good - in the sense of being easy to write/maintain.

All that said, if I could only get GnuCash to compile on my Mac, I’d be interested in working on this.  So it’s not all about complaining.  I tried to compile last year, but failed before the busy season was upon us.  I tried again last month or early this month, but I fear the busy season will again be upon us before I have success.
----

To address the original query, I’m not sure it can be reliably done.  You may be able to tweak it, but the result will not be portable to different systems.  Reports are generated in html which is much better for being reliably rendered on multiple machines, than it is for being reliably rendered the same on multiple machines.


On Mar 19, 2015, at 10:31 AM, Mike or Penny Novack <stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:

> On 3/19/2015 9:42 AM, L. D. James wrote:
>> Does anyone know of some way, plugin or workaround for Invoice design that will correctly place the company return address and the customer's address for a No. 9 Double Window Envelope (CO165)?
>> 
>> If nothing else, hopefully someone might have some knowledge of how the style sheets are stored so that I can try to manually edit the specification.
>> 
>> Thanks in advance for any suggestions or comments.
>> 
>> -- L. James
>> 
> 
> 
> This is precisely the sort of thing that you don't (or shouldn't) want inside the accounting package. What you do is produce the output from gnucash as a file and then process that file through a "batch editor". For crying out loud, if you had a large volume to mail out, you'd be wanting them presorted and batched  by zip code. Expect THAT from inside the accounting package?
> 
> Those of us who worked (or still work) in the cypher mines will tell you, keep things as independent as possible. If next year you have a slightly different envelope window placement you DON'T want to have to touch an accounting program to make the necessary adjustment. The folks in the "print room" who are going to do things like testing the fit into envelopes don't require access to the books!
> 
> 
> 
> Michael D Novack, FLMI
> 
> PS: If you give it a little thought, you will probably be able to come up with a whole bunch of other things you might want to do. Split off those longer overdue and/or larger amounts for a special insert? Split off large/important customers for a special insert? That presort by zip separating out the zips for which you can get a lower postal rate by batching?
> 
> PSS: It's the "batch editor" where you should be doing things like changing fonts, inserting logo graphics, etc.
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