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Hi folks,A friend of mine (well he's a friend and a customer) runs an online business creating wedding invitations, stationary and other such items. At the moment to do the wedding invitations they are using Microsoft Office 2000 with a custom designed template.
Now they are looking to expand and get a couple more PCs. I have already suggested until I'm blue in the face about OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office, but this friend of mine is adamant that he wants to stick with Office 2000 or 2003 (he doesn't even want to consider Office 2007 at the moment as his wife who does the printing doesn't know how to use Office 2007).
Now I've suggested to him that possibly the way to go instead of buying copies of Office (which he'd need an Open Licence agreement with Microsoft to get downgrade rights) would be to have a custom designed web application instead.
I wasn't sure if there was anyone on here who did things like this, but from what I can tell (from what I have seen of what they do), they would require the following:
Easy to use system to enter text for invitations - They would need to be able to enter/edit/delete text with a WYSIWYG interface with different text formatting, justification (center, left, right align etc) and the option to choose fonts.
The ability to save/load invitations - They would want to be able to save and load invitations which they have created.
The ability to add true type fonts - They occasionally get asked for specific fonts from customers, they would need the option to be able to add/delete True Type (TTF) fonts.
Export to PDF - They would need to be able to export to PDF. For printing off (I'm guessing it's the easiest way of getting the invitations printed off) and also for e-mailing to customers as proofs (at the moment they're printing to a PDF from Word with PDF Creator).
They would also need to get the system to place the text on the page in a specific way. At the moment if I am right they have a Word template which they use which has the margins setup for the custom card stock they use.
I wasn't sure if there was a GPL'd web application out there that they could already use which could be modified to suit (first thing that came to mind was something like Google Docs, but an open source version).
At the moment I've just put the idea to them in an e-mail, nothing may come of it as they may decide to stick with MS Office (I'm hoping not), but if anyone out there can do this, I'd certainly be interested to know what sort of price they'd be looking for (for the initial system and then updates if need be) so I can put it to them for consideration.
Ta, Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html