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Comment by masa331 | Hacker News Reader

This is actually pretty cool. I'v been working in an accounting company and i'v been thinking about such thing a lot lately. Is Factur-X used in practice in Germany and France? Do you know about some other similar things?

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The lower-level library is used in Odoo ERP for example. Possibly others, as there are a few implementations[1] (mostly Java). This is lots of work because you need to create the XML yourself. I tried to make mappings between simple keywords and the XPaths of different XML standards (there are a bunch)[2]

So in theory you could just give a few keywords and get the full XML. Currently this is on hold, but if someone has a use case and wants to contribute, I'd be happy to continue working on it. I also provide this other library[3] that extracts some essential data from PDFs. The plan is to use them together to automatically build the XML from just the PDF.

1: https://www.invoice-x.org/related/

2: https://www.invoice-x.org/standards/

3: https://github.com/invoice-x/invoice2data

Thank you! I will look into these. I know the problems. As i was working in the accounting firm i was dealing with imports/exports from various accounting softwares a lot. In fact i'm currently working on an app which can convert between them as my side project.

As far as I understand this the "standard" is the XML that is being embedded inside PDF, so you need a small tool to extract the XML from the PDF and then you've got the standard XML invoice. The PDF is just for nice presentation.

I did a similar approach of using XML Stylesheets (XSL) to render the standard invoice as HTML when opened, this also looked nice.

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