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 (we geeks do not know 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 versions 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 people have noted, this could create hard to find bugs if the href differs from the content of the tag (ie what is displayed), thus I included a warning in that case. 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.
