KoReport ODT Renderer

[Dag]

Søndag den 22. april 2012 16:35:34 Adam Pigg skrev:
> Dag
> 
> In Plan, i see you have your own ODT renderer.  It appears to be more
> featureful than the one in libs/koreport, so perhaps you could move it
> there?
Done, branch: report_odt_danders
> Can you post a sample of what kind of ODT it produces?

Ok, I have looked more closely into this and found some problems that makes it 
difficult to export to odt in usefull manner.
Imo the reason (often) to export to odt is to be able to edit the document 
afterwards, to add comments and evaluations. Hence it needs to be easily 
editable while still presenting the data formatted the same way it was in the 
original report.

Reports are built up of items (label, field, picture etc) that correspond very 
well with shapes in words (frame in odt). So in my current implementation I 
just create a frame for each item in the report with the same size and 
position. This looks good, but is mostly useless as the a document consisting 
of individual frames is for all practical purposes impossible to edit.

One could argue that reports often consists of tabular data so it should be 
just to put it into a table, right?
 Well, yes *sometimes* it could work well, other times no because the report 
designer are able to position his items *very* freely in a way that makes it 
very, very difficult to put it into a table.

One solution to this would be to introduce the conceptof tables into the 
report designer. Thus it is up to the user to decide when to use table and 
when to use individual frames. This has the additional benfit that it the 
designer will be *much* easier to use, creating a "table" today is a serious 
pain.

Another problem in odt export is headers/footers. Afaics it is not possible to 
use frames inside these in neither words nor LO. Plain text or tables work 
fine, but alas, not frames.

Solution? I have none.
Any ideas?


-- 
Mvh.
Dag Andersen