Comments on: Kraft Document Templating System

By: Klaas Freitag

Klaas Freitag — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:39:52 +0000

Thanks all for the very interesting input. It’s very much, over time we will dig deeper into that topic and maybe contact you for details. Thanks for your help!

By: Michiel Leenaars

Michiel Leenaars — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:30:09 +0000

Hi Klaas,

I think you should probably look at ODF-XSLT. Although it is written in PHP5, I think the solution it provides is very much what you need (even if you may have to port it) – a document generator library that brings the full power of XSLT to OpenDocument files. It enables you to use ODF files as if they were plain XSLT templates. It also includes a few extra parsing options that allow you to edit the XSLT parts of these ODF from within your favourite office suite. ODF-XSLT is developed by Sander Marechal, the lead developer of Officeshots.org, and is released as Free Software under the GNU General Public License, version 3:

http://www.jejik.com/odf-xslt

Best,
Michiel

By: Thomas Zander

Thomas Zander — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 03:10:53 +0000

So from my reading of the kraft webpages I understand that this is a bit of a database-publishing workflow. The actual user interface for entering information was not in the screenshots at least.

This is something that KOffice intends to make possible. At least its a usecase that I have had in the back of my mind for a while now.

Creating templates is indeed something you can do in KWord. This includes the placement of things like logos, address-boxes, footers etc etc.
The missing piece right now is easy support to take that template and match it with external content. We have some (python) scripts that do this in a basic manner already but you might find that a bit simplistic. The scripting API needs a lot of love 😉

I’m a bit unsure what your ideal workflow is. Where does the user type his content? Is there any WYSIWYG editor involved? What happens when the text has just one line on page 2? The answers to those questions are likely going to be very different based on what technology you use. Making this workflow happen *inside* of KWord by means of plugins can give you a lot of power and flexibility.

Feel free to ping me on IRC or give me a call if you are interested in more details!

Thomas (KWord maintainer)

By: Thomas Richard

Thomas Richard — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:17:24 +0000

Hm, I didn’t really have the time to look thoroughly at Kexi’s report designer and Grantlee but what would be the big difference between these two?

By: Stephen Kelly

Stephen Kelly — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:55:27 +0000

Grantlee is intended for that kind of use. I intend to use it in KJots and other areas of KDE PIM. I’m having some cmake trouble with it at the moment, but when that’s solved it will get a 0.1 release.

http://www.gitorious.org/grantlee/pages/Home

By: jstaniek

jstaniek — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:27:33 +0000

Klaas,
Kugar successor, Kexi’s Report Designer and Renderer, is coming in KOffice 2.2. Interestingly, it’s a fork (read: cleanup) of OpenRPT. Exports to HTML and paints using QPainter so also on QPrinter. For more info, ask on koffice-devel at kde.org.
The idea with using KWord is also out TODO, it’s about generating different types of documents in a bit different way.

For news about the development, read http://www.piggz.co.uk/index.php?page=allnews

PS: Now we have ODF-like open format developed… http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Kexi/Plugins/Reports/Fileformat