I agree, I have a Default, Easy, Footer and Fancy, only the default is different, with no colours, full width and no left margin.  This is when invoices are "printed" when in invoice view.  When an invoice from Reports->Business->Tax Invoice, selecting any style makes no difference.  An invoice produced via Reports->Business-> Fancy Invoice results in a different look again with only Default being different, again with no left margin and full width.

I tested this with an empty .gnucash directory as I'd customised my everyday-use invoices. I have found the invoicing style selection to be a tad confusing.  

Since they do appear to be same and a user can derive a new style from a template it does seem pointless maintaining apparent duplicates.

I agree that the reported issue is a problem. However, we don't have to fix this with 2.4.0 - it can very well be worked on at a later stage.

As a regular user (of GnuCash), I find having 3 very similar stylesheets / stylesheet templates confusing. (There also is no guidance on which one to use in the documentation.) I decided to do a little investigating, based on GnuCash 2.6.15 on my Ubuntu machine (apologies for any mistakes or if this is patently obvious):

There are 4 stylesheet templates installed:

* Easy
* Fancy
* Footer
* Plain

(There also appears to be a "Head of Tail" (stylesheet-head-or-tail.scm) template in git but it isn't installed on my system, so I don't know much about it.)

Each stylesheet template also "instantiates" a stylesheet by default:

* Easy - based on the Easy template
* Technicolor - based on the Fancy template
* Footer - based on the Footer template
* Default - based on the Plain template

Since a stylesheet is just a stylesheet template plus user-selected options (e.g. font sizes, colours), it is the templates we are concerned with.

On the history of these templates:

* Plain and Fancy were added first (in 2000, based on the copyright). Their names distinguish the two pretty well.
* Easy was added in 2004, as part of James Strandboge's "Easy Invoice" patch. Easy was based on Fancy, but aside from some minor code changes, there doesn't appear to be any functional difference between Fancy and Easy.
* Footer was added in 2010. It appears to be based on Easy, but added a footer text option.

So in essence, Fancy and Easy are functionally identical, and Footer is "backwards compatible" with Fancy and Easy.

What I'd like to see (based on this brief review):

* Remove Fancy and Easy
* Add "hidden aliases" for Fancy and Easy that point to Footer, so that existing reports continue to be formatted correctly, but Fancy and Easy are no longer selectable templates when creating new stylesheets
* Rename Footer to something more generic (maybe becoming the new "Fancy")

Also, in the future, let's add new templates only when there are significant differences from Plain and Footer, otherwise continue improving those two templates :-)

I would concur on the confusion point. It took me quite a while of playing around looking at the options of each to get it straight.

It seems to me the most versatile is Footer.

Just delete the rest, rename it to Plain, and remove any garish color assignments from it. (effectively making it 'Plain' but with more options)

There doesn't need to be more than one included stylesheet by default especially if there are no significant differences.

Certainly, the names 'Easy' 'Fancy' and 'Technicolor' don't provide much help in choosing.

GnuCash bug tracking has moved to a new Bugzilla host. The new URL for this bug is https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635708. Please continue processing the bug there and please update any external references or bookmarks.