Category Archives: articles

Adding Balances to GnuCash

How do you get balances into a new GnuCash file?

When I first setup the free GnuCash accounting system quite a few years ago, there was a wizard that walked me through the process. I just followed the steps and it did things to make everything work. To my recollection, it was a nice, easy and mostly straight forward process.

At some point it asked about opening balances and I just told it the answers and “stuff” happened. Everything just worked. That’s all fine at the time but if you want to set up a new file for a new year, you need an inkling of what the “stuff” was.
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Document Scanning and Paper Size

Are you having trouble getting scans to be the right size?

I’ve had a few people recently report that their document scans were coming out full size instead of the correct paper size.

One person was doing a web-based solution – document scanning within the browser! (That really impressed me as we seem to be locking things down these days rather than making them more useful. There are important concerns so I’d never thought anyone could navigate through that; but he did.) I suspect there were many problems in getting to that point but the only problem remaining was the scans were coming out the wrong size.

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Improved scanning to PDF for CmdTwain

CmdTwain 2.12 has been released and it produces better PDFs for multipage documents.

CmdTwain 2.11 provides a scan to PDF option. It works great for single page scans and it does support multiple pages. But, the two don’t work together quite as intended. People were reporting that the first page scanned was getting placed as the last page in the PDF.

The cause is due to how filenames (for the pages) are sorted within the program. It uses the whole filename including the extension during the sort. For backward compatability reasons, page one is always named (something).jpg and pages two on are named (something)-00002.jpg etc. The character ‘.’ is stored internally with a value of 46. The character ‘-‘ has a value of 45. This always puts "(something).jpg" after "(something)-(anything)" which is not how it needs to be.

CmdTwain 2.12 comes with an improved sort routine that handles these cases properly.