MICHA.ELMUELLER

Several banking houses use LaTeX to generate their bank statements (in german: Kontoauszüge) into pdfs. There are many pros to such a system: speed, small pdf size and a large number of packages, for example. In my case I had to adjust the invoices of a Magento Online-Shop instance.

I didn’t want to get into the Zend PDF printer and since I am quite familiar with LaTeX I took the opportunity to develop an extension. Of course no web server runs TeX out of the box. But since it is really easy to install a TeX distribution like TexLive, this shouldn’t be a problem if you own a root server and have some disk space.

 
Basically I wrote an extension for Magento which serves pdf invoices generated from a LaTeX template.
This means that it is very easy to modify your invoice template, so that it uses your corporate design etc.. This also means that your invoices will stop looking poor and start looking tight 🙂 .

The code is available for free, licensed under the LGPL.

Check out my github account for more informations.

 
Update: Seeing that there were some visitors looking for LaTeX invoice templates: You find them here.

Update: If you are interested in what other industry applications LaTeX is used for check out this post.

Important: Wolfgang Mederle has created an updated version of the module. I wrote my code a couple of years ago and Magento has undergone some changes in the meantime. If you want to use the module today you will be better off using Wolfang’s module. You can find his code here. Thanks Wolfgang!