Printing system - alternative proposal for pdf output

[Pongrácz István <..hidden..>]

Hi,

I am a little bit frustrating to get full utf-8 pdf output support from lsmb

I am able to use xedemo templates with xelatex, here are my experiences:

• editing xelatex templates is a horror story, especially if someone not expert in *tex,
• seems utf-8 support does not work out of the box (which is interesting, because the Hungarian sql-ledger fork is working without issue, only thing is needed in the template: \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
• somehow generating pdf with xelatex incredibely slow, comparing to the previous solution

I made a little research around the following topic: how to create pdf from html, with utf-8 support. After checking some theories (cups-pdf, html2ps), I found the following:

• wkhtmltopdf (usually part of the distribution)
• how to use example: wkhtmltopdf invoice-VSZ10001.html invoice.pdf

It is fast, supports utf-8, just works in one comfortable step.

So, my proposal is to consider implementing an alternative pdf output, using wkhtmltopdf. The source is the html template but the output is pdf in one quick step. The result is really fine, except it is necessary to edit almost all of the layouts, because surprisingly I found that, html layouts needs serious changes to get good result.

Check the attachement, it is an example. It still needs some adjustment, due to the wrong html template.

Cheers,

István

 

Attachment: invoice.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document