[ Thanks to Dmitri
Popov for this link. ]
“* odtwriter is part of docutils, a set of tools for
converting plain text files into other formats such as HTML, XML,
and LaTeX. This means that you can output the formatted text file
into other formats besides ODF. This is a more efficient approach
than creating an odt document in Writer and then jump through hoops
to turn it into, for example, a clean HTML file.* Using odtwriter, you can generate ODF files on machines that
don’t have OpenOffice.org or other ODF-compatible word processors
installed (e.g. you are running a lightweight Linux distro).* You can use whatever text editor you like as your
distraction-free writing environment, leaving the task of producing
the properly formatted document to odtwriter.* odtwriter has a few features that are not available in
OpenOffice.org. For example, OpenOffice.org doesn’t support syntax
highlighting, so making code blocks in a Writer document more
legible and pretty is a non-trivial task. odfwriter, in turn, can
apply syntax highlighting to the code blocks in the final odt
document.”