[plug] Building a GUI app to generate a wordprocessed letter

[Derek Fountain]

This is a bit off topic, but someone on here might have experience of what I  
want to do.

The requirement: user enters customer name, address, and a whole pile of  
application specific information, and the system produces a letter for them  
(confirming an appointment in this case).

I can do the MySQL database. I can do a front end for entering data into it.  
What I don't know how to do is feed the important fields into a decent WP so  
it generates a letter.

Ideally the WP would be OpenOffice, in which my user could produce the nicely  
formatted skeleton of the letter. Is it possible to do a merge-on-the-fly  
sort of operation in OpenOffice Writer, preferably under external script 
control? The underlying format is XML, so it sounds possible...

-- 
"...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE 
...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, 
they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003