[GNC] Printing invoices to PDF on OSX/Mac

[Waltr]

This message is in response to a referral in a comment to the GnuCash suggestions concerning the PDF printing implementation change going to v4.4.

I probably don't update gnucash as often as I should and we missed the 4.4 ... 4.12 versions.

In the comment Frank Ellenberger referred to this list.

My comments follow, followed by a link to the original referring page.

There is a serious operational issue with the move to the print dialog in OSX environments. The functionality in the print dialog defaults to a general file and does not remember the customer file where it belongs. This requires one of two actions: a.) a cumbersome change to the file name/location which in our operations requires a time consuming multistep directory change or b.) allowing the document to print to the default directory then moving that invoice to a proper customer directory for emailing.

The risk in the latter option is that the invoices will get mixed, or misnamed at generation time, or not moved at all and lost in the crowd of documents. In addition, for more structured systems environments, the documents directory is largely devoid of end documents and will rapidly become cluttered unless they are deleted which increases the risk of an inadvertent deletion of other mission critical data.

For the Mac OSX environment, the printer dialogues themselves permit a PDF option in the system dialogues.
I suggest a modification to make this much more efficient and safe in one of two ways:

-  Allow a system print dialog option which on OSX and some Unix system (we use FreeBSD) which will permit a rapid and efficient and most importantly recallable pdf selection.
- Gnucash is fabulous about remembering things about journal entries, which most of the time works really well. Extend this capability to the "Print to a File option" in the invoice printer.

Right now, the window block for file/directory storage function is very small, defaults to a single directory which is generic on osx, (/Users/xxxx/Documents) and because of this must be made more globally readable than some systems implementations would like.

Permit either a recall the prior for that customer/invoice combination to store new invoices printed to a file, or the modify the menu button to allow selection of HTML or PDF export with the ability to efficiently select where the pdf file will be placed.

Thank you.

Link to original post:
https://gnucash.uservoice.com/forums/101223-feature-request/suggestions/42356944-make-pdf-icon

Walt