Generating report into .odt

[mslade]

Hi, I'm looking for some high level advice. My company generates a lot of reports that follow a predictable format: intro text, executive summary, technical summary, then into the report. The report is a series of items that all adhere to the same format which is a summary table, summary text, etc. Both the high level stuff and the report items contain a lot of conditional formatting based on the contents of the report (e.g. "trivial" would be bland but "major" would stand out).

The order of the report items is important and tends to change as I work, and formatting it all can become tedious. I'd like to automate creation from structured data such as a database of report items (which I would populate separately). This way I can change the data around and re-generate the report quickly.

I'd welcome any advice on how to approach this problem. I've been looking at python libraries for generating .odt files but the most promising one I found, relatorio (http://code.google.com/p/python-relator ... ickExample) doesn't seem to allow me to customize formatting, only contents. Is this something pyuno can do?

[RoryOF]

Perhaps
http://search.cpan.org/dist/OpenOffice- ... /Intro.pod