Nota CLI

A command line interface to Nota.

Nota eats your HTML based static or scripted template, allows you to mix in your data and excretes pretty PDF documents. Perfect for automating things like invoice or ticket generation, but also a convenient tool rendering a simple static document to PDF.

Usage

Nota has lot of handy CLI options. Try running in the root:

nota --list

You'll see Nota comes with a few example templates out of the box. Try:

nota --template=example-invoice

When finished Nota has rendered a simple PDF page, consisting of some custom rendering of preview data as declared in the template's nota.json file. Change the company logo image and try modifing the example data to see how easy it is to customise it and create your own invoice. If you have a template that needs data and you'd like to render save with a specific filename to a certain location, try this:

nota --template=example-invoice --data=<path> --output=<path>

Web interface

Run Nota as a webservice, and create your PDF's though a friendly UI where you can upload a JSON file and get a PDF in return. Or use the REST API to expose Nota over your the interwebs or LAN (or VPN). Send a POST request with JSON, and get a PDF download in return. Try in your shell:

nota --template=example-invoice --listen

Development previewing

Develop and debug while feeling right at home in your favorite browser, with a 1:1 preview of what Nota turns into a PDF for you. Nota makes designing and programming your documents a breeze with some ready examples that automagically compile CoffeeScript and SASS. Try in your shell:

nota --template=example-invoice --preview
cd templates/examples-invoice && grunt

And you're ready to start customizing!

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, and we've made a provisioning script that sets up all dependencies for Linux (and unverified support for Mac and Windows under cywin).

chmod +x provision.sh
./provision.sh