Thursday, March 20, 2008

Future Evolution Printouts

I've mentioned it in the past, but one thing that eludes developers is the passion that users have for eye candy and especially printouts. Regular computer users just absolutely *love* to hold paper, even if it's easier and more efficient to do the same tasks with their software.

Evolution really needs a simple plugin system for creating printout templates. I would love to contribute templates in this manner, for inclusion in future releases. I suspect many others feel the same way.

We had an immediate need to create a printout that should come from Evolution itself. I ended up just writing my own little program using the CreateSimple perl library which allows for easy generation of PDF files. The script opens an .ics file and then formats the output. It only prints boxes for dates with appointments. All of the current Evolution printouts are time based, and this one is more event based.

This is the kind of stuff that would move Evolution ahead of competing products in the minds of regular computer users.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes! This makes so much sense. I've gone so far to make a custom script to generate PDF for the contacts because I didn't like Evo's default output. A template-based system would make it easier and encourage sharing, too.

Did you open a feature request bug? I'd definitely vote for it.

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