The authors are happy to announce the new release 0.95 of Kraft. Kraft is free desktop software for managing office documents like quotes and invoices in the small enterprise for the Linux desktop.
Kraft Version 0.95
With version 0.95 we do a big step forward in the way of generating documents: Until now (more than fifteen years!) Kraft uses the ReportLab python library to create high quality PDF documents.
While this has served us well, it has always been cumbersome to adopt the template for users needs. ReportLab uses a XML format as the template which has a bit of a steep learning curve and is not really easy with syntax.
This changes now: From version 0.95, Kraft supports the cool project WeasyPrint. The principle remains the same: The document is built of a text based template which defines the look of the output document. That gets filled with the document data and gets converted to a PDF document. But unlike ReportLab, Weasyprint is HTML based. Many people know a bit of HTML and thus will have an way easier time to adopt the template to personal needs.
Apart from the ease of use, it is much more simple to do modern report design with Weasyprint, as it supports the wide range of CSS styling.
That is a great improvement, as adopting Krafts output to personal needs is much more intuitive now. For now, Kraft supports both rendering engines, but ReportLab based reports are deprecated now and support will end in future releases of Kraft.
Along with integration of Weasyprint the text templating library Grantlee was added, as it is the standard in the KDE/Qt world, well maintained and widely available. The ctemplate library which was used for that so far will also be deprecated.
The other great improvement in this release is that Kraft now has a user manual embedded which will give new users a guiding help. It will open in the browser once the user clicks on the menu entry in the help menu, also without internet connection. It was started by a community member and it will grow and improve over time.
As usual this new version also ships an amount of bug fixes and small improvements which can be found in the Changelog.
We wish all users big fun with this remarkable new version of Kraft.