Emailing of reports

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Why do emailing of reports don’t attach the report you are sending?

Thank you

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Have you tried enabled the obsolete pdf functionality

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6 posts were split to a new topic: Custom Themes

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If you had searched the forum as the FAQ/Forum rules indicate, you would have found the answer in this yesterday’s post.

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The internal PDF generator is an Obsolete Feature, once it’s gone, the emailing of reports feature will be gone.

That’s why I am placing this in ideas.

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Yes @Ealfardan and question is for you and other moderators when are you gong to challenge @Lubos to not keep removing features without replacing them with something better. In my view all is a mess at the moment. No custom themes means we either continue as we do with the obsolete feature, fearing it will disappear. no PDF attachments, scary as well, etc. Whatever is happening is not helping the users and I pity any moderator to try to defend the indefensible until @Lubos comes clear about where this is all going. We are waiting too long!

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@eko you are one of the senior and respected members of the forum. You already know that our job as moderators is not to challenge the developer. Instead, our job is to moderate the forum.

Also, thus far there has never been any true loss of functionality and you should know this as an active member of the forum:

  1. Themes will be replaced by something else and they are still kept until then
  2. Internal PDF generator has been replaced by customer portals and html documents and they are still kept until all related issues are resolved

Moreover, regarding the html documents, the developer has taken into account the user security inputs about the URL and now it doesn’t expose the business UUID or any other part of the database except for the domain. This should answer many of the security issues pointed out by users.

To sum up, whatever apparent loss of function is a direct result of overall improvements to the structure of the program driven by regulations and/or user inputs and suggestions. In case this loss of function is intentional, @lubos will make sure to announce this clearly in the forum. On the other hand, in case this loss of function is accidental then our job as forum moderators is to identify such a loss and classify it in ideas or bugs depending on the specifics of the case – as is the case with this topic.

Imo, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for issues that have been fully discussed and decided on since we all know exactly what is ultimately going to happen and we also always have an alternative to whatever feature that’s been removed. In that sense, true loss of function has been quite rare, if any.

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13

Thanks for you elaborate response, but this is simply not true! You can argue that because it is still available in “obsolete” that all is fine. The truth is that @Lubos has been removing functionality rather than fixing it. He not so long ago wrote that his aim is that Manager would be a completed application not needing any further support. That is just not cutting it as there is no application in the world that is completed.

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There is a survivorship bias in this argument. The vast majority of improvements are fixing issues without removing functionality. When functionality is removed, it’s because it was wrong direction to go. And even then, I try to preserve backwards compatibility to reduce complains.

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Sorry @Lubos but that is solely from your perspective. As a user it almost looks as if you are tired with Manager and want to move on. Removing or altering anything that is complicated to support (PDF generation, custom reports ,extensions, etc.) to get a passive application. This is not how things work as you recently witnessed with an attempt to localizations with many countries not included or mentioned such as Nigeria without any real attempt. Friendly advise is to sit back and rethink all of this, If too difficult or tired to keep interest then move it to open source or sell.

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@eko let me address each point one by one.

  1. Converting HTML to PDF is solved problem. Web-browsers can print to PDF. What I was doing with internal PDF generator was reinventing the wheel. But web-browsers do not allow website to convert HTML to PDF using javascript. This means removing internal PDF generator kind of breaks emailing feature in Manager. The solution to this is to send report in the body of email rather than PDF attachment. I’ve done some experiments and it works well in most cases.
  2. Extensions were added only to support QR codes for Saudi Arabia. But I have now better solution where QR code for Saudi Arabia or other countries can be rewritten as sales invoice footers. I need to implement ability to have dynamic placeholders within footers. That will remove need for Extensions. Also, Extensions have never even been announced as a new feature. They were quietly added for localization purposes.
  3. Localizations is very ambitious undertaking. Who else in the world is tackling this problem? For this year I want to test a few new ideas for it to take off.
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RE 1: Indeed and that is one important problem. No working alternative. Also a PDF attachment is safer and less prone to be dumped into a spam-folder or worse refused when trying to capture all in an HTML email with financial details that are difficult for recipients to file. Associated with this is the lack of corporate style (although part of HTML+CSS could cover this). The reality is that emailing PDF attachments straight from Manager was an important feature that did not get any decent alternative that is useful to file for the recipients be it customers or suppliers.

RE 3: Indeed localizations are an ambitious undertaking and quite some time ago you were advised not to let the community write these for you but look for experts / consultants to do these. The issue is that this favours only some and many do not benefit, say for example USA, where it just is impossible to do. So alternatively you should just provide the instruments such as extensions and/or other programmable interfaces for users to do and control themselves. It would be a nightmare for any accounting application to keep up with all tax authority permutations on a permanent basis, quickly either running obsolete or incomplete.

I hope this helps.

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This has been now resolved in the latest version (24.4.4)

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Sorry @Lubos, it is just some kind of quick fix but not the desired solution. Why is it that almost any application I use can generate and send email attachments. Yes, even Manager can do it with the PDF generator that so far is still working fine for us. I realize that some good solutions for PDF generation discussed before require costly licenses. So one solution could be that when a user wants to enable such solution they are prompted to purchase a PDF generator user license or otherwise use the print-to-pdf and inline emailing.

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@eko many of those applications you are talking about will work fine with English and latin text but will fall apart the moment you use Arabic (right-to-left or bidirectional text) or some other non-latin script (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc)

There is no PDF library that can do it all correctly. From my past testing, the best one is PrinceXML and can handle almost everything I throw at it but they do not sell royality free license. And the price is $495 per computer. Just not viable.

I found web-browsers to be the only layout engine able to produce good enough PDF using any UTF-8 characters. And unlike PrinceXML, web-browsers are free. But web-browsers do not support printing to PDF via javascript.

So the only solution would be to ship entire web-browser with all the fonts… and now Manager is not 100MB download. It’s at least 1GB download. Bundling the entire web-browser with Manager installation would also become a lot more complex and more brittle.

Another alternative is for Manager to use local Google Chrome installation in headless mode. Although it forces user to install Google Chrome, it works reasonably well on the desktop. But it’s such a pain on the server because headless servers do not have Google Chrome and to install it comes with a lot of dependencies that are typically not deployed on servers. Just again overcomplicating things.

So in the end, I didn’t discover a way to do it without getting into too much complexity. And haven’t seen anyone else to discover it. My focus is on making good accounting software. Emailing documents as PDF files is not core competency of Manager. In the future, there will be eventually simple way to do it, or people will move away from PDFs. I mean the idea of PDFs is to have a digital format that can be printed reliably on physical media (paper). People tend print less than before so we might not need PDF in long-term.

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So let’s keep searching while stop-gaps including the “obsolete” PDF generator and now the inline option can be replaced. It is unfortunate that the inline solution, when printing to PDF, includes the email body.

I am also not sure that it will render the in-line correctly once you allow for customisation of for example adding colour through the footer and yet-to-be developed header “module” or with “obsolete” custom themes [just tested and would not show vertical lines in columns tables but does show colour].

Did you explore ITEXT?

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The major advantage of pdf is the display format is known and fixed when the document is produced.

Other data encoding results in changes at the receiving end, formatting of which is often inferior.

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iText was embedded in Manager at some point but there were way too many bugs and weak UTF8 support. Currently, Manager is embedding Apitron PDF SDK which was better than iText but even that came to dead end when bugs that I’ve been reporting to them have been piling up and not resolved. That’s when I gave up on internal PDF generator. I’ve tried many other PDF libraries, always discovered issues right away.

There is simply no money in PDF SDK libraries. Very few customers. But the tooling requires a lot of effort to get right. PrinceXML is the only library that I have confidence in but their pricing is extreme.

Well, then there are web-browsers which are almost as good as PrinceXML and free.

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I get it, but accounting documents are functional documents. They don’t have to be looking perfect to serve the function. And in those cases, when you do want perfect, you can always produce PDF yourself and email it separately outside Manager.

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I agree for reports but no for invoices and receipts. Many businesses invest in a consistent corporate identity from visiting cards via letterheads to invoices. This builds trust and more important recognition with the recipients.

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