What should be the preferred way to style generated documents (ie. invoices)
alexanderadam opened this issue · 9 comments
If everyone have to use a fork it may get diffcult on one point.
Yepp, I fully agree. I actually don't have a clear strategy yet, and am very open to suggestions!
We currently allow for using a PDF as background, this gives basic possibilities of customization. We could also support changing the text parts easily. Allowing custom fonts is also doable. But it's not so simple to allow depper customization in layout or structure with the current approach (Prawn PDF generation).
There some possibilities like:
- Use a HTML5 Wysiwyg widget + wkhtmltopdf
- Use a reports builder/generator framework
- Implement some pdf.js based preview with Prawn elements absolutely positioned and drag'n'drop to change the positions...
They are all non-trivial... Do you see other, better possibilities?
And: do you have actual needs?
wkhtmltopdf is terrible for proper print styling.
From a technical point of view is prawn really nice and I have also no easy solution for the moment. Sorry.
A compromise could be a basic possibility to upload / select fonts, sizes, a few colors and a logo.
Adding a logo is already possible, though not really documented:
You can upload a PDF as attachment in the Tenant view. Then select it's use as 'Invoice Template'. It will be used as background of the generated Invoice PDFs. This way it's also possible to create nice VESR payslips you can mail. (And yes, the swiss post assured me that they accept printed out orange invoices as long as their reader will recognize it;-)
Here's a PDF containing a VESR template. It includes the CyT Logo that you would need to drop. I hereby release it under the AGPL as the rest of Bookyt. We did create it from scratch, without relying on other templates. The logo is protected by trademarks so you need to get rid of it;-)
Implementing custom texts, font upload, size and color selections would be very welcome additions! :-)
Mmh, AGPL does not make sense for a PDF. I release it into the public domain respectively https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0/
Nice, didn't know that.
I have no idea how to use tenant view etc neither.
The lack of documentation makes this pretty difficult. 😉
The payment order is really nice but I haven't configured bookyt properly so no accountdata yet. I guess I still need to configure the pc_id.
What does the 609 on the mean on the payment order?
Will I need something from from my bank to make this work or should the regular account data be enough?
Would you like to make a small intro to bookyt and what it needs to configure someday?
Regarding the debit invoices you may go with simple bank payment. Then you do not need anything special from the bank.
If you'd like to use the orange invoice (VESR) you need to ask your bank for VESR. It will give you additional numers you then need to configure in Bookyt. Pro for VESR is that you can download a VESR file from your e-banking and all the payments will be assigned to the invoices. The invoices look more professional, and people can use those scanners to quickly enter them into their e-banking. Con for VESR is the bank only record the numbers, and not the actual client anymore. So you need the accounting software or some other record of the VESR ID you assigned to the invoice/client.
I'm happy to give some introduction. We may also do a meetup with @luxflux @silvermind and other interested parties (with a doc-hackaton:-)