Re: Upcoming 2.0 of LedgerSMB

[Gerald Chudyk <..hidden..>]

On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 1:54 PM, Joshua D. Drake <..hidden..> wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 16:24 -0400, David F. Skoll wrote:
>> Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>
>> > I firmly believe we need to eliminate Latex or at least not make it a
>> > requirement and move to more modern technologies to generate invoices.
>>
>> What?  Why?  LaTeX produces beautiful output and makes it easy
>> to customize the printed results.
>
> No it doesn't (the easy part). Again, "at least not make it a
> requirement".
>
>>   What do you propose to use instead?
>>
>
> Probably good old fashion CSS or XSLT.
>
> Latex may be great for you but if I walk into an office and say, "Sue,
> here is how you customize templates" and its tex? I might as well walk
> back out, cause she will have none of it.
>
Hopefully in the future there are enough templates to choose from, and
at a sufficient level of completeness that Sue doesn't need to
customize much. If she can create sophisticated spreadsheets from
Excel templates and build Access databases on a whim, then LaTeX
should be manageable. It is, after all, a few steps up from writing
postscript. Of course the templates need to be clearly written and
contain many lines of something called...uhm...'comments'.

> We *need* at least as an option to provide simple, easy to modify,
> preferably from the browser, templates.
>
>
I don't really care what we use. As long as there are reports designed
for printing. I do not mean the screen dumps that seem to pervade this
application. Maybe Joshua is on to something with XSLT. Maybe then the
stuff could be sent to a good report generator or spreadsheet for
formatting and printing. I bet Sue is expected to know how to use a
spreadsheet. She does work in the accounting department, right?

Gerald.

p.s. Apologies to Sue if I have mistreated her in any way.