LedgerSMB can create PDF and Postscript documents for orders, invoices, and more. This is an optional feature and requires some additional software not included with LedgerSMB, including a LaTeX distribution and extensions to Perl’s TemplateToolkit framework.
The PDF and PS invoices are generated using a program called LaTeX which handles the layout and typesetting. The actual LaTeX files are creating using Template Toolkit with extensions for LaTeX. These extensions are in the Template::Latex package available from CPAN. The software then generates a LaTeX file which is then processed to create a PDF or PS.
Typically the first thing to do is to install a LaTeX distribution like TexLive (distributed with many Linux distributions and available for OSX and Windows). This provides LaTeX and many of the modules needed. In general I recommend that if your distro has a texlive-extras package that you install this too.
After this is installed, you must then install Template::Latex. This can be done by typing on the command line:
# cpan Template::Latex
This will also install a number of dependencies including LaTeX::Driver, which will need to know where your LaTeX binaries are. It is usually pretty good at finding them.
If things go wrong and you can’t get it to work, the following commands may provide useful diagnostic information when requesting help:
From the LedgerSMB application directory: $ perl -MLedgerSMB::Template::Latex -e print
From the doc/manual directory in the LedgerSMB application directory: # pdflatex LedgerSMB-manual