[Vtigercrm-developers] TeX printing

[Jens Hamisch]

Hi,

> I do *not* want any bit in some $office_format. I just want to 
> have my bills as pdf w/ *my* custom layout. Latex is an very
> proven approach. 

let's get back to the generic solution: (la)tex is not standard
on Unix platforms, but (g|t|n)roff and tbl is! Those provide enough
features to produce high quality formulars. And they do not intro-
duce another prerequisite.

I havn't had a look at what finally came into the 5.0.3 branch. But
I already introduced different pdf templates for all organizations
and orgunits ...

> > There's another thing I'm missing in vtiger: document management.
> 
> Ugh, that's another story ...
> 
> > And the logical consequence would be: All documents produced by
> > vtiger should be based on the same standard as the documents managed
> > by vtiger. Than it would be easy to manage self-produced documents
> > as any other documents, too.
> 
> Interface != Storage/Encoding/Format.

Agree. A document management should be capable of handling any format
of a document, so Office docs, scans and also latex would not contradict
to the document management approach.

However, to get more things covered office would be the first choice,
because to create letters out of a vtiger attached document management,
we need an interface to the office suite (which of course could be
simply the creation of a base document that becomes opened).  Having
this interface, we have evverything at hand to simply create any
formular w/o interfacing to yet another monstrum of third party
software (which latex definitely is!). Also the latex approach is even
more complex, because the templates themselfes prerequisite according
latex extensions to be installed (at least may!). In comparison the
office suites are monolithic and therefor complete.

And finally: latex was and will be forever a system used by some experts.
It is not addressed to people thout programming skills. I'm afraid it
will not be possible to hand over the template definition to one of
your sales and marketing people if it is based on latex. Office keeps
this door open ...

Jens

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