[GNC] No PDF button

[Geert Janssens]

Op dinsdag 24 november 2020 09:30:03 CET schreef Chris Green:
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 05:48:48AM +0000, nco2018 at outlook.com wrote:
> > I have been using gnucash for about 7 months on linux mint without any
> > problems but have recently installed in on a mint 20 machine. The problem
> > now is there is no way of producing a pdf of the invoice I've  created,
> > the
> > PDF button is missing. I have also tried installing older versions but
> > always get the same gui without a pdf button.
> 
> Presumably gnuCash requires something to be installed for it to be
> possible to produce the PDF.  That program is present on your older
> installations but not on the newer mint 20 machine.
> 
> I know that [x]ubuntu moved from using evince to atril for displaying
> PDF files, maybe mint has done something similar and gnuCash depends
> on the older PDF program.
> 
No. The  gnucash built-in capability to generate pdf files was driven by the webkitgtk library in 
the past. The newer version of that library no longer provides the functionality. And we can't 
stick with the old one as it has been removed from about all sources we depended upon (for 
fair reasons, though not very helpful to us).

So currently gnucash delegates pdf generation to the built-in printing capabilities of the 
underlying operating system. Most print dialogs have some way of printing to a pdf natively (I 
have checked KDE plasma, MacOS, Gnome, the flatpak environment, Windows 10).

So if you want to generate a pdf, look for an option like "Print to file" or "Save as pdf" in your 
printer dialog. These days it's usually listed as an additional printer to choose from.

Regards,

Geert