writer2LaTeX

This is probably going to be my last post to the Zenoss Blog, seeing as how I’ve only got 2 weeks left on my contract, but I wanted to take the time to shout out to Henrik Just and writer2LaTeX. Henrik’s software, which is now also integrated into OpenOffice, is fantastic. The last big project I worked on for Zenoss was the OpenOffice (.sxw) to Plone converter for the HTML-ization of the Zenoss Guide. The purpose of generating an HTML version, split by section, was to

• provide an easily accessible on-line version (non-OpenOffice, non-PDF)
• have multiple versions of the Guide be searchable
• provide users with the utility of being able to comment on each section of the guide

There was XML-wrangling, HTML post-processing, and Plone content type generation involved — lots of moving parts. At times, we ran into issues such as Java problems (what writer2LaTeX is written in) or obscure/hidden formatting issues in our source document. Other times, we needed specific features that weren’t in writer2LaTeX.

Enter Henrik: he helped us out a great deal, not only by discovering the root issues of several of our problems, but in addition addressed the features we needed with instant patches. He and I worked together to test these features and make sure everything was running as expected. His responses and contributions ended up saving Zenoss big $ and me big time. Thanks again, Henrik!