I am trying to create a custom invoice theme like in the screenshot above. I am able to modify the theme and create the respective theme. When I try to export the the theme, the resulting PDF is completely blank, while on the theme preview, results shows fine
The following the is code written (Making it opensource for others to use)
What am i doing wrong ?
Theme previews are not representative of any particular transaction. They are only meant to show the general appearance of a custom theme. Particular transactions populate variable arrays with different information, depending on context. And they include or exclude variables entirely, again depending on context.
Your sample screen shot also shows quite a bit of content that does not exist for sales invoices. It’s not clear what that screen shot shows, but a sales invoice does not return, and therefore cannot display, a great deal of the information. I don’t know where, for example, you think you will get information on validity periods.
At any rate, the purpose of this forum is not to help users debug their custom themes. Those are you own responsibility. And you are better off seeking guidance on dedicated coding forums. Ask your accounting questions here about features of the program and how to use them.
Thanks @Tut. With my friend’s help, i could fix the pdf problem. It was incorrect formatting of the html in the theme. Apparently multiple tables are not accepted at the base level. Also colspan was one of the culprits. A very simple way to fix the problem with theme customization would be to divide the paper into tiny grids and define what all to be included in which section.
Two points, @kn01:
Themes are not written in HTML. They are written in Liquid. See https://www.manager.io/guides/10368. While there are similarities, there are important differences. As deeply as you seemed to have dived into your project, I thought you already knew that.
Liquid does not divide display space into tiny grids. Your suggestion would require a fundamental rewrite of the program. Manager is not meant to be a graphic design tool. It’s an accounting program that gives users enough flexibility to meet the vast majority of needs with a certain degree of customization. If you are determined to develop complex forms of your own (or match others’ designs), you should probably look for a different application.
1/ Thanks. The link to Liquid will help to beautify and clean the crude design of the basic theme template. I am sure it will benefit many users of the application (esp from India). Ease of use, Visual appeal and Result Delivery are among the strongest points of any software popularity. I am sure you will agree.
2/ I totally understand it is not a graphic design tool (It is actually not a bad idea to develop a separate tool for advanced custom theming). I do intend to make themes for both portrait and landscape orientations of various paper sizes. Not sure how draining would that be. It wont hurt to develop clean and functional themes with ability to personally customize.
Thanks again for the pointers. I was introduced to the application by the same friend and I think it is majorly beautifully written software. An opensource non-mono (read python :-)) version would be highly appreciated!
Manager is a proprietary program, developed, distributed, and licensed by NGSoftware as a business venture. Do not expect an open source version.
can you share your working theme if you succeed , i am really interested to the tax colums, maybe i can try to adapt a portion of it to my invoices, as we are required to show item price taxable amount (value without VAT) total of VAT (in your case gst) and total amount, is you input manual on these colums or is auto calculated ?
The above screenshot shared is what i want as the final result from the theme. But the application is closed source so I can only rely on the default results in the application. What you want is not feasible because the results sent to the theme donot contain that data in columns. Moreover the result table sent to the theme is dynamic in nature and the columns change with different conditions making it difficult to customize.After 8 hours of programming in Liquid today, I could comeup with a theme which lookos satisfactory to me and serves my requirements. Sharing a screenshot of the result theme.
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This is for intra state transaction case
fully understand that this is why i couldn’t do something like that even with the help of some programers, but i am told that it possible in liquid to make calculations add, multiply etc and i thought you found a way to do that
Liquid can do those things, but only by working with data made available by the program for the display. When Manager does not pass the data to a transaction form, Liquid can do nothing to display what is not there. Liquid is a templating language, not general purpose calculation or database software.
Oh I understood now what you meant there. It is possible to do that - not directly but through a workaround. Let me try that and come back to you. Also share your existing manager file with few sample transactions.
