Nota

Nota hosts your HTML based template, allows you to render in your data and excretes pretty documents. Stand-alone HTML, recommended for digital transfer, or PDF, recommended for print (analog transfer). Perfect for automating things like bulk invoice or ticket generation.

Usage

There are several ways to interface with Nota.

CLI

Use Nota CLI package to call Nota using your shell. Currently supports single jobs only. See there readme on the repository for usage options.

API

For batch rendering, directly interface with Nota in Node.js. Call queue with an array of job objects:

var nota = require('nota');
nota.setTemplate(template);
nota.queue([job1, job2, job3]);

Where a template looks like:

template = {
  path: 'path/to/template-dir'
}

And a job object looks like:

job = {
  // hash containing data for your template model
  data: {},
  // alternatively provide a path
  dataPath: 'path/to/data.json',
  // Optional. Can also extend with filename to fix output or if template doesn't specify one
  outputPath: 'path/to/output/dir',
  // if you don't want to overwrite an existing file if output get's same name
  preserve: true,
  // buildTarget: 'pdf' // or 'html' (alternatively your template can specify per job)

}

Web interface & REST API

To create your PDF's though a friendly UI where you can upload a JSON file and get a PDF in return, try the webinterface. Or use the REST API to expose Nota over the interwebs, LAN or secure VPN. Send a POST request with JSON, and get a PDF download in return. Run Nota CLI with the --listen flag. For example, try in your shell:

nota --template=example-invoice --listen

Prerequisites

You will need the following things properly installed on your computer.

• Git
• Node.js (with NPM)
• Bower
• PhantomJS v1.9.8

Setup

Due to some shortcomings (see Known problems) in the depencencies that are still being worked out, Nota is a bit picky on it's environment and dependencies. We recommend running Nota under Linux.

Wiki

Check out the wiki for documentation on the API, architecture, examples, how to's, known problems, scability etc.

Meta

Developers

Nota was originally comissioned by Aerix to automate the task of invoice generations after alternatives like LaTex or MS Office proved insufficient in the flexibility and easy of producing neatly designed documents through a programmable interfaces.

Shortly after inventid joined in on development after it adopted Nota for automating the generation of event tickets.

Both Aerix and inventid are two young Dutch internetbureaus who are passionate about making shiny apps and contributing to open source innovation.

How to suggest improvements?

We are still actively developing Nota for our internal use, but we would already love to hear your feedback. In case you have some great ideas, you may just open an issue. Be sure to check beforehand whether the same issue does not already exist.

How can I contribute?

We feel contributions from the community are extremely worthwhile. If you use Nota in production and make some modification, please share it back to the community. You can simply fork the repository, commit your changes to your code and create a pull request back to this repository.

Collaborators

We would like to thank the developers which contributed to Nota, both big and small.

• FelixAkk (Original developer of Nota, developer @ Aerix)
• joostverdoorn (Developer @ inventid)
• rogierslag (Developer @ inventid)