Lately, I added some new features to relatorio.
- The use of ConTeXt to generate pdf files, it thus remove the dependancy on the trml2pdf that has not seen a release in age. It also shows how you can use a shell command to generate documents.
- Support for the opendocument spreadsheet and presentation files, the help of Udo Spallek has been precious for this. So with relatorio, you can now generate a dump of your data, and use it to construct pivot table (us geek do not now what it is but believe me it is a key knowledge for every big business consultant), and presentations.
The openoffice change involve a change in the way you add your variables to the template. In previous version we were using <text:placeholder> tags, but it was not possible to add them through OO UI (and that they get replaced if you add them by hand) in Calc. We choose to replace it by <text:a> tags, the URL must start with relatorio:// and be followed by your directive or expression. As some has noted this might create subtle bugs thus I included warnings if the href attribute differs from content of the tag. But I think that if you are using the genshi interpolation feature there should be only structural information in the A tags.
Another nice addition to the openoffice templating mechanism, is that now we support inner documents. Thus if you include an opendocument spreadsheet in a text document, the data inside the spreadsheet will be interpreted as well.
UPDATE: finally, relatorio now supports both the old <text:placeholder> syntax and the new one.
