PDF Reporting tool for abandon is now available

Hello all. I just released abandon-reports today, and I hope it helps others as it has helped me in keeping my accounts.

Background

abandon is a text-based, double-entry accounting system. This type of system was made popular by ledger-cli. However ledger-cli was written in C and not easily portable across different OSes. Hence I published abandon, a tool written in Scala, which makes it cross-platform. I have been developing it for several years now. It is actively used by many users, including myself.

Reporting requirements

abandon intentionally generates only text reports. To be able to generate other reporting formats, abandon has the capability to export its data in XML format. I used this feature to write a PDF reporting tool and this post is to announce its availability.

PDF format makes it easy to print these reports and to share them with other people.

I have been using a prototype of this tool for several years internally. But while chatting with other users I realized that such a tool might be useful to a wider audience. Hence I am open-sourcing this tool today.

Polishing and Release

As an internal project, the tool wasn't well documented, and was not configurable.

In order to make it useful to others, I added some command line options and written a readme file explaining how to use the tool. I plan to add more options, depending on how users use the tool.