PrintPDF, CashBook updated, build tools released

Now have their innards on display

The day before the recent London Show, Steve Fryatt, who was unable to exhibit at the show, announced updates to two pieces of software – PrintPDF and CashBook – and a change to his choice of licence for the software.

PrintPDF provides the user with a simple and effective way to produce PDF documents from any application that is able to print using the standard RISC OS printer driver system, using GhostScript and a PostScript printer definition file. It allows a ‘PDF printer’ to be set up, and printing to this opens up a ‘Create PDF’ dialogue box, where relevant options can be set up, and the resulting PDF file saved in the usual way.

The update to PrintPDF is actually only a very minor one, in that it offers no new functionality, only a new version number. Significantly, that version number is 1.00, and marks the software’s status changing, with it no longer considered to be beta.

CashBook is Steve’s popular home accounts application, which allows users to keep a full track of their personal finances, tracking money through unlimited bank, card or other types of account, and allowing income and expenditure to be analysed under a number of categories, which can then be used for budgeting or reporting.

Version 1.30 is, according to Steve, the long-overdue release of the test build that has been available for some time, which adds BeagleBoard compatibility, improved report printing, and better search facilities.

Both PrintPDF and CashBook are now open sourced and licensed under the European Public Licence (EUPL) [PDF],  an open source licence that is compatible with the GNU General Public Licence, version 2 (GPL2).

With the software’s source code now available, Steve points out that for it to be of any use, the full set of build tools that it uses also needs to be available. To that end, he has also now released his OSLib-based  C Wimp library, SFLib, along with command-line utilities for building RISC OS application menus, MenuGen, and documentation, ManTools. Binaries are provided for these that run on both RISC OS and Linux, but the makefiles for all of the sources are written to run with the GCCSDK running on Linux.

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