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.

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