Status of ODF Tools book

["J David Eisenberg" <jdavid.eisenberg@gmail.com>]

Note: I'm thinking out loud here, so this may not be the most coherent
writing you've ever read.

The book is, at the moment, stalled.  I have started using ODFDOM for
converting Celtx [1] files to ODT [2], and in the process, discovered
that I needed to write some convenience routines to avoid
lengthy/repetitive code. This is where most of my creative effort has
been focused. Creating styles or master pages, for example, takes a
lot of code. A more "programmer-friendly" method of creating styles
would be highly useful, and might have an immediate impact on
developer interest in the toolkits.

I also found myself wanting to write these utility routines as I was
doing material for the book; I could see that I was "too close to the
XML" in both ODFDOM and odfpy.

The main problem is that I can't decide on the correct direction to go:

* Proceed with the book, concentrating on ODFDOM, odfpy, and OpenOffice::OODoc
* Write the book as a series of articles
* Work on the convenience routines for ODFDOM, which may also be
useful for odfpy

The question is: what is the thing I can do that will have the most
impact in the shortest timespan?

[1] Celtx: A media pre-production application; http://celtx.com/
[2] Result is at http://langintro.com/celtx/