Hello everyone. Does anyone have a recommendation for an external app to make XML files for the PDF templates Netsuite supports? I understand that SS2 allows you to import an XML file and pass it as a PDF template, but I find that the native template editor of Netsuite itself isn't very conducive for designing specific templates themselves. Any and all inputs appreciated, thanks!

I use VScode with the freemarker extension

There isn't an easy external application to be honest. For the built in templates, you can't actually directly export them, you have to copy and paste. If you wrote some Suitescript though, as you said, you could upload a file and generate a PDF with that. As @Jon Kears said, VSCode with Freemarker is probably as good as your going to get. Freemarker is pretty obscure, so I think a text editor with the extensions installed is going to get the closest. You might also see if they have a Big Faceless Organization PDF extension as well, because that's also a part of the templating language (though much less used than Freemarker. I also should mention that the version of freemarker is quite a few versions back, so some functions in freemarker might not work.

@Jon Kears thanks for the tip. I downloaded VSCode and will be trying it out for a few days with the extension and see if it fits my workflow. @Michael Pope yeah, I've noticed there's no shortcut to testing out the template other than manually pasting the updated XML text in the file's record entry every time, then just having a button in another window to trigger a Suitelet that generates the PDF using said template. Thanks for the inputs, I very much appreciate them.

No prob. Hope it continues to work well for you.