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Posts Tagged ‘Templates’
Friday, March 19th, 2010
/ von Jens Neulen
SalesKing has a new Partner: plan.io Projectmanagement
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
/ von Schorsch
PDF Templates – Estimates without total
Whether estimate, shippingnote or order confirmation, there are few situations where it is requested not to show the total in a generated PDF. For this cause you have now a little check-box with a big effect.
Checkbox in template settings to hide total and carrry-over
While hiding the total also the subtotal and the carry-over to next page of your document are hidden if you choose this option in your template settings. Existing pdf templates do, of course, show the total as usual, for cases where you do not want to hide the total, for example on your invoice-pdf-templates.
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
/ von Schorsch
Easily copy your pdf-templates
Your own pdf-templates can now easily copied including the settings with one click.
Show Icon (blue +) to easy copy templates
The possibility to also copy the default pdf-templates is not supported yet. New are the fields subtotal and carry-forward which can translated free now. Furthermore are the settings of blocks that are not used, automatically hidden.
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
/ von Schorsch
You need multiple page pdf-invoices? The pdf-table-machine helps.
The KingPDF-TableMachine, that is how it exactly called, is responsible for the perfect allocation of tabular invoice-data across multiple pages. The TableMachine creates nearl y every kind of header or footer, administrates data-fields and manages the needed table-place over the different pages.
If it is an Invoice, an estimate or a Paymend-Reminder, the KingPDF-TableMachine needs to deal with many different unknown data but has to present a clean pdf-document.
That means if the SalesKing-User creates a pdf-document, we are not able to know:
- how many data he uses: items of an invoice or estimate
- how many columns are used: description, quantity, price…
- how many headers or footers are used: carry over, delivery costs, total, subtotal
- the used pdf-template: invoice-template, estimate-template, credit-note-template
- changing pages within the template (page two differs from layout of page-one)
The process of creating a pdf-invoices does come to the user or developer some kind of trivial or easy job… it is…. If ALL of the above mentioned things are known BEFORE. But if you deal like this you’ve got restrictions and restrictions are the enemy of the SalesKing! The SalesKing does aspire liberty in document-design and layout. Two of his biggest enemy’s on his way are word-invoices or excel-templates.
If you now think: “But my word-invoice is payed in the past” we can just answer that word is not made to optimize your invoicing-workflow, even for 5, 100 or 10000 invoices… but that is another topic.
The dark side
… in most cases just seen by the developer and in this special case I have had seen very much darkness before seeing the light. Now, everything is lighten up a bit, we are able to allocate very much items of payment-reminders, invoices, estimates with very less boundarys on very much pages.
As so often there is also a dark side at users-view, he has to learn how to work with his new opportunities. As we try to support this learning-process with some way-marking templates, everybody has a special-case to deal with at some time. And the management of these special-cases does the KingPDF-TableMachine.
Liberty in layout, design and multi-page
The new weapon of SalesKing, the KingPDF-TableMachine, tests every page 2-3 tmes with the real Invoice-items before it will be able to be printed. It is responsible for:
- the allocation of invoice-items per page
- carry-overs of each following page
- sub-totals on the end of every page
- no “alone”-standing totals on the last page
- fitting of the items within the place-holder-box, not affected by the quantity of columns and rows within the item-list
- overwriting of the footer-text (=normally unused place)
- variable positioning of the invoice-items on every template page
If you are already SalesKing-User, you now will find some settings of the KingPDF-TableMachine on every template-setting-area:
Pdf-Templates-List
Settings for table in pdf-template
You want to set the template more individual? Therefore you have to work on the Placeholder-Block “line_items”. If this says nothing to you yet, please read the other articles of the “KingPDF-Templates”-serie.
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
/ von Schorsch
Freedom of movement: work on pdf-templates with acrobat
As mentioned in the first article in our KingPDF-Templates-series, I will now explain the customization of your SalesKing-Templates with placeholders. Let’s step in immediately:
You have created a invoice-design in your favourite graphic-software and now want to use it in the SalesKing. After Exporting it as pdf and re-opening in your Adobe-Professional (with the Block-Plugin) your template is ready… o.k. … nearly ready. The SalesKing, of course has to know where he should write the data you want to have in your invoice (Invoice-number, invoice-items….). Now we come back to the articles-header, because a really flexible template-system needs to deal with two keyfeatures:
- Freedom of movement while placing the placeholders
- Many and mostly: intelligent datafields
Let’s get in touch with the first feature now, the other one I will reflect in the next article of the series.
Freedom of movement with blocks
The called placeholder-blocks in the pdf-template will be filled with real data while creating the pdf-document. The SalesKing does identificate the while reading their names and does deliver the needed data. The creating-process of the pdf-documents in SalesKing does the, among experts well known, PDFLib with the Personalization Server (PPS). Within the PPS there is the Acrobat Block-Plugin, which gives the ability to work with, create, copy, the ex- or import of placeholder-blocks. As followed, you can see a screenshot of a invoice-template. You can see the blocks with their red-marked names and on the second page you can see a block-dialog for the marked adress-field.
Within SalesKing the Blocks are also shown in the pdf-settings oft he pdf-templates. Here another template:
In your document, you can place Blocks on every position you want. Additional every block does have settings which do define the formatting of the letter printed text. There are so many opportunity’s to customize your template, theresor I will just mention them shortly:
- Text: font/clour/hight/flow/alignment
- Colour: outline/filling/text
- Type of block: text/picture/pdf
- For every block-tpe special options
All of that is until yet not really magical, but I have to say that I wonder I did not now it until yet. But we would not be SalesKing if we are not done with these customization-tools. That is why we decided to pimp our blocks.
“We do have customized blocks”
In the above mentioned options I did not refer to these two:
- SalesKing defined custom fields
- Blocknames with special meanings
Here you can see the propertys of the block field “notes_after” with a custom field:
Every Block can contain this special field “show on page” – it does manage (as you can imagine) on which page of the document the block is shown. This field is made for multi-page documents and can contain three different settings:
- First – the block will only show up at first page
- Last – the block will only show up at last page
- 2 – the number of the page where the block should show up
As you might noticed, we do allow multiple pages per tamplate or printed document. A multiple-page pdf therefore does need a intelligent page numbering. This does provide our Blocknames with special meanings. One of these is the “page_number”-Block:
Within the page_number-Block you can format the ouput oft he page-numbers as you want. In the example the are set to show “Page 2 of 3”.
Multi-Page-Invoices + Multi-Page-Templates = Problem
…not for the SalesKing, because a new pdf will be created page by page from the template. If the created pdf does have more pages as the used template provides, the last template-page will be used for all following-pages. Hard to imagine? A Example:
You create a pdf, with many items, over three pages and you use a two-page-template.
For the first page, the first template page will be used, and the block “notes_after” won’t be shown as pictured above. Just to say it again: His unused place will be used automatically. The following two pages will be generated from the following template-page. The allocation of the invoice-items, as the settings of sub-totals and carry-overs will be proceed automatically. Of course the “notes_before”-, and the “notes_after”-Block of the second page will be overwritten.
Sounds quite simple and will be seen as Standard from professional Users, but the most Invoicing-Tools does not support such features. Maybe we do distend with that, but if you ever was in the situation to create documents with more than one page, you will know what I am talking about.
Not enough liberty yet? Read in the next KingPdf-article:
- Breakdown of items on multiple-pages
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
/ von Schorsch
Flexible creation of professional invoices via pdf-layout
Today a long desiered dream becomes truth. I have made our more flexible pdf-table-machine come to live.
To explain what this dream is about and what this has to do with flexible layout, I will explain much more and mybe you will be teased to check it out with your very own templates.
The template.topic is on my side for years, that is why I decided to write this KingPDF-Template series. That is my way to bring light into specials of this topic and google is happy too.
In this very first article I will write about the graphic-fundamentals. There will follow as the workflow defines the work with placeholders, the organization and backround job in SalesKing, and some table specific things.
The Invoice Layout
From the beginning of writing invoices, in every software-workaround it is necessary to set the invoice-template. If it was the layout or the settings of the included data, there ever was something that limited the liberty of customization of the template. In not one software it was possible to implement a professional design-agency-workflow from the layout design to the ready to print document with any lost of quality.
All my tryouts if in word, excel, lexware or diverse other online-invoing-tools ended with the sad knowledge that they all are:
“too unflexible”
Why was that? Is the question and the easy answer is:
“no one uses pdf-templates”
o.k. somebody will now say with word you are also able to generate pdf’s. Yes, of course, but, word is on one hand not able ot use graphic-input and on the other hand word is not able to use placeholders to generate some data automatically. I will optimize my made sentence a little into: “no one uses pdf-templates with implemented data-fields”. I will write about the placeholder thing within one of the next articles, that is why I now focus on the graphic-software thing.
Our opinion is:
“A professional Document comes from graphic-software”
The professional, creative development process of company-documents starts in a graphic-software. Here the designer has while following the corporate-design full liberty. He does not has to follow conventions for fonts, colours, alignment or some fancy decorating stuff and he can guarantee that the graphic-file is as an pdf print-proof.
Normally you would now try to build the delivered design into a word, excel or html-document with the goal to build a template for your new documents. But this is the step which is bad. Why implementing a pdf into some other format (with much work and lost of quality) to get after creating the invoice a pdf-file again? The SalesKing does fight against these fromat-jumps, because:
“We’ve got pdf-templates”
The SalesKing PDF-Templates do give the power over the data-placeholders to the designer. The Designer can customize and place them variable in Adobe Professional. This solution does safe money, delivers the wished design.
In SalesKing the set placeholders then will be automatically filled with the data for example names, addresses, numbers or pics and the result is, what else, an pdf-file…..
We can not say all that positive things about the SalesKing without mentioning that we do also have some limits. First of all the work with the placeholders does need some time to deal with. But more about that in the next article in the KingPDF-Templates-series.
