It’s recommended to post things or comment on things that are not just promotion of your own projects. You have 2 posts and 1 comment, and all 3 are links to your own stuff.
Personally I use a LaTeX workflow to generate my PDF invoices. Dusted it off recently and it still works after 4 years unattended! I didn’t even have the computer I have now when I last used it. Meanwhile I’d never heard of Typst, so I looked it up – first release last year. Will it work in 4 years, unaltered, from an install I make today?
Invoicing is annoying. It’s better when your invoice software doesn’t need to be upgraded/fixed/made compliant.
IDK if Typst will work unaltered in 4 years, but being able to generate beautiful PDFs with a single 33 MB binary instead of several GBs (the size of a LaTeX distrubution, IIRC) is a breath of fresh air.
Ditto re: promotion, but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Typst.
To give a concrete example, here’s a resume template. It cleanly separates structure from data, in contrast to it’s upstream (which FYI has a picture).
While it doesn’t accept YAML, it does reap the benefits of a sharing a homoiconic language across these contexts. But that language– it’s modal! IIRC, the template and config files start in different modes that you basically quasi-quote between as code is interleaved with data. In one mode, smart-quotes are a function call and white-space is embedded in strings. In the other, smart-quotes are automatic and white-space is collapsed. With this, an end-user can declaratively define styling exceptions (as code) into their configuration markup (-down?). They’re passed into the template as rich, box-bounded objects. Feels kinda like if HTML ate CSS’s syntax and box-model instead of stuffing it in a string for later. I’d rank Typst well above average in degrees-of-freedom: you’re more likely to hit a limitation in the template’s API than in the language, and the distance you can push that is pretty impressive.
The Docs are pretty solid. Implementation limits that do exist are clearly still being worked on. Re: longevity I’d like to highlight the work that’s been done on HTML export, and Pandoc support (which both sides have discussed and collaborated on openly and extensively).
Sorry, using Lobster isn’t in my muscle memory yet, but it’s listed on my release checklist 😅
Having a properly working LaTeX installation has definitely given me some headaches. Sure, if that’s done LaTeX is stable. But that’s a big if.
The syntax has been pretty stable over the last releases, and debugging is so much faster with ms compile times. So I’m fairly certain you can get it running in a few minutes in 4 years.
This is the 2nd or 3rd ‘pretty invoice generator’ I’ve seen recently (there’s one advertising on TV). Is this really a market? I mean, 1) who manually creates an invoice outside of the accounting tool they’re using (e.g. Quickbooks) enough that you need a product to do it and 2) who cares that much about super-fancy invoices? I have never once looked at an invoice and said “needs more bling”.
Yeah, I guess it’s a little over the top, but on the other hand I’m always annoyed if I get an invoice where the 2 most important things (IBAN & total amount) are hidden somewhere in light gray text 😩
Google->Invoice Template - 205 million hits. I also don’t need (or want) a web site to format my text. But we’ve already established I’m not the target market.
P.S. - Your link is 404.
people who like to own their accounting tools
I used Quickbooks as an example that people are familiar with, not that it’s the only option. I bet there are tools on plaintextaccounting can do a decent invoice without a separate service.
It’s recommended to post things or comment on things that are not just promotion of your own projects. You have 2 posts and 1 comment, and all 3 are links to your own stuff.
Personally I use a LaTeX workflow to generate my PDF invoices. Dusted it off recently and it still works after 4 years unattended! I didn’t even have the computer I have now when I last used it. Meanwhile I’d never heard of Typst, so I looked it up – first release last year. Will it work in 4 years, unaltered, from an install I make today?
Invoicing is annoying. It’s better when your invoice software doesn’t need to be upgraded/fixed/made compliant.
IDK if Typst will work unaltered in 4 years, but being able to generate beautiful PDFs with a single 33 MB binary instead of several GBs (the size of a LaTeX distrubution, IIRC) is a breath of fresh air.
There’s tectonic, which is similar in that regard. Single package, automatically downloads ctan packages under the hood.
Ditto re: promotion, but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Typst.
To give a concrete example, here’s a resume template. It cleanly separates structure from data, in contrast to it’s upstream (which FYI has a picture).
While it doesn’t accept YAML, it does reap the benefits of a sharing a homoiconic language across these contexts. But that language– it’s modal! IIRC, the template and config files start in different modes that you basically
quasi-quotebetween as code is interleaved with data. In one mode, smart-quotes are a function call and white-space is embedded in strings. In the other, smart-quotes are automatic and white-space is collapsed. With this, an end-user can declaratively define styling exceptions (as code) into their configuration markup (-down?). They’re passed into the template as rich, box-bounded objects. Feels kinda like if HTML ate CSS’s syntax and box-model instead of stuffing it in a string for later. I’d rank Typst well above average in degrees-of-freedom: you’re more likely to hit a limitation in the template’s API than in the language, and the distance you can push that is pretty impressive.The Docs are pretty solid. Implementation limits that do exist are clearly still being worked on. Re: longevity I’d like to highlight the work that’s been done on HTML export, and Pandoc support (which both sides have discussed and collaborated on openly and extensively).
Sorry, using Lobster isn’t in my muscle memory yet, but it’s listed on my release checklist 😅
Having a properly working LaTeX installation has definitely given me some headaches. Sure, if that’s done LaTeX is stable. But that’s a big if.
The syntax has been pretty stable over the last releases, and debugging is so much faster with ms compile times. So I’m fairly certain you can get it running in a few minutes in 4 years.
This is the 2nd or 3rd ‘pretty invoice generator’ I’ve seen recently (there’s one advertising on TV). Is this really a market? I mean, 1) who manually creates an invoice outside of the accounting tool they’re using (e.g. Quickbooks) enough that you need a product to do it and 2) who cares that much about super-fancy invoices? I have never once looked at an invoice and said “needs more bling”.
Google->Invoice Template - 205 million hits. I also don’t need (or want) a web site to format my text. But we’ve already established I’m not the target market.
P.S. - Your link is 404.
I used Quickbooks as an example that people are familiar with, not that it’s the only option. I bet there are tools on plaintextaccounting can do a decent invoice without a separate service.
Yeah…I hate that too.