Some time ago I quickly wrote a little utility to render XRechnung documents on the free desktop, called XRView. This is the initial Bogpost. It was a very fundamental Qt Widget app that shows e-invoice docs that come in the XRechnung XML format, in a human readable view.
It was never properly released, so recently I decided to wrap it up and finally cut a first release which people can find on the release page on Codeberg.
Technically it uses the XSLT stylesheets provided by Kosit and calls an external java process on the local machine to run that through a specific Saxon processor. For that, XRView requires a java runtime installed.
Since the setup of these dependencies is a bit cumbersome, the new release 1.0 does that for users. It downloads the stylesheets and also the saxon processor runtime from their upstream repositories and stores them on the local machine for future use. Of course it is strongly recommended to double check the downloaded resources for their validity and integrity and not to run software that some other code downloaded.
More new features in this first release are:
- internationalization, first available language is German
- a rudimentary application menu with about dialog and such
- the setup routine as described above
Note that this is the first release of the software. Yet, I think it is useful, and a interesting starting point for further activities in this area. As XRechnung will become a mandatory standard for all companies in Germany (at least) I think it is very important to have a free software alternative. There are already many commercial offerings.
However, I am not feeling to develop and maintain this as an “one man show” forever. Being kind of frustrated about the way how free software is often consumed nowadays, I will happily continue to contribute to it if there is more interest than “gimme for free” by other people or organizations.
Let’s see if this is heading somewhere :-)