want to pay bills online in Linux

[Hugh Esco]

I don't think that on-line bill paying is anywhere in his plans, but Dieter 
Simander's SQL-Ledger (http://www.sql-ledger.com/) can -- I believe -- 
already print checks.

SQL-Ledger is a GAAP compliant, double entry bookkeeping program.  At 
version 2.0.5 and undergoing active development, it promises to continue to 
serve expanding needs.  It seems more suited to commercial and particularly 
manufacturing businesses than home or personal finance.  But except for 
investment portfolio management, I would think it would handle home 
economics just fine.

Written in perl for a PostgreSQL or Oracle back-end, it's Open Source, GPL 
and is available with contracted support from DWS, the author's 
company.  Its pretty clean and very lean on the dependencies.  I imagine, 
without having tried it, that it will work fine with lynx (there are lynx 
sub-directories in the source hierarchy), though, being sighted myself, I 
have had best results using it with the Mozilla browser (both Netscape and 
Konquerer gave me problems).

Can't help you with the OCR.  But I'd think that either LaTeX or SGML, on 
the other side of the learning curve would handle both the formatted 
printed output question and hooked up with your database, the envelope 
generation, as well.

Hope that helps.

-- Hugh Esco

At 05:41 PM 4/2/03 -0600, you wrote:
>If you ever figure out a way to do that sort of stuff in Linux, I sure
>hope you post it.  The unfortunate truth is that many sites are so
>hard-coded to expect Internet Explorer or Netscape, that anything else is
>considered inferior.  You can thank Microsoft for including IE with the
>OS and thus making sure everybody who sets up web pages tests with IE and
>nothing else.  There are four things I'd like to do with Linux that would
>make me be able to comfortably use it as my sole OS.  1: print out checks
>to my printer and keep track of finances.  2: print envelopes.  3: have a
>decent OCR package that is at a reasonable price.  4: have the ability to
>create nicely formatted documents and preview them before printing.  Some
>of this is certainly possible already.  I could eventually sit down and
>learn tex or SGML, but a lot of newbies will be a little stubborn about
>learning this.  For me, it's mainly a lack of time.  I have heard of a few
>good commercial OCR packages on this list and intend to investigate them.
>The only free one I am aware of is gocr, and it is far from usable.  I
>wish I knew more about OCR so perhaps I could help make it better.  I know
>that there are a few financial packages out there, but I don't know of any
>which can print checks.  Sorry about the rambling, but I feel for you and
>others who wish we could truly have a choice in OS.  I think things will
>get better when an X screen reader gets to a point of being functional,
>but it looks like that is easier said than done.  It's a shame too.  Linux
>is stable, fairly secure, and even if an application bombs, it doesn't
>take down the whole OS.  I can count on my fingers the number of times
>I've had to reboot a Linux box due to a crash, and all the times it
>happened were when I was testing something which was known to be
>problematic.
>
>
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