Goals
The aim of Writer2LaTeX is to provide you with a set of tools centered around conversion from OpenDocument format to LaTeX and XHTML+MathML.
The Writer2LaTeX export filter
The export filter Writer2LaTeX allows you to publish documents you have prepared with Writer – in particular documents containing a lot of formulas. LaTeX does a better job typesetting text with formulas, so even though you use Writer to prepare your document, you may prefer to use LaTeX as a backend for printing; including pdf generation. Writer2LaTeX gives you extensive control on the export of formatting:
You can convert arbitrary documents into clean LaTeX code, stripping all or most of the formatting.
You can convert a well structured document to LaTeX, mapping styles to LaTeX code.
You can convert a well structured document to LaTeX with most of the formatting preserved, thus using LaTeX as a typesetting engine for your document.
You will never get a result that looks identical to the original, in fact that's the whole point: LaTeX is in general a superior typesetting engine compared to OpenOffice.org. For example LaTeX produces much better results for formulas, it has an excellent paragraph and page breaking mechanism, it uses ligatures etc. On the other hand OpenOffice.org has a few features that LaTeX does not support well. If the layout of your document depends on text flowing around pictures or linked text boxes, you will never get good results with Writer2LaTeX.
According to TeX's author Donald E. Knuth, TeX is a typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books - and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics (quoted from "The TeX book"). Writer2LaTeX will aim to produce excellent result for this kind of documents; including of course shorter texts with a book-like layout.
The Writer4LaTeX frontend for LaTeX
Traditionally, LaTeX code has been written by hand. If you find this too technical and somewhat arcane, using a graphical editor like LyX is an alternative. The Writer extension Writer4LaTeX will aim to provide the tools to turn Writer into a graphical editor for LaTeX, thus providing an alternative to LyX. Writer4LaTeX integrates Writer with your LaTeX distribution, enabling you to control the entire process from within Writer.
You should beware, that Writer and LaTeX differs quite a lot in concepts – so there will always to be some limitations. In particular LaTeX is really a programming language, while OpenOffice.org works with a finite feature set. This implies that you never will be able to produce arbitrary LaTeX documents using Writer. Expert users may embed LaTeX code directly in the document to work around this limitation.
Writer4LaTeX will aim to provide a smooth and seamless integration of Writer with your LaTeX distribution. It is a major goal that it should be possible to use Writer4LaTeX without any technical knowledge of LaTeX, and yet give the expert user access to (almost) the full power of LaTeX.
Writer4LaTeX is currently in development and will be a part of Writer2LaTeX version 1.2.
The Writer2xhtml export filter
The XHTML+MathML combination is designed to bring mathematical documents to the web, so you may (should) prefer this format to make documents containing formulas available online. The export filter Writer2xhtml will convert your document with as much formatting as possible preserved. Alternatively you can use your own stylesheet to format the document. For documents without formulas, Writer2xhtml also offers to convert to HTML4 compatible XHTML.
Since a printed document is quite different from an online document, Writer2xhtml ignores certain formatting (page style, columns) and creates a lot of hyperlinks, eg. for cross references, to/from footnotes, from the alphabetical index etc. You can use this to publish Writer documents to the web, or you can use it to produce rich content for a Content Management System
Writer2xhtml will aim to produce valid XHTML documents that are a faithful representaion of the original document, while adapting it to an online context.