JODReports and MS-Word

I finally implemented my document generation application using JODReports. The basic idea is as follows; user creates a bunch of templates using the JODReports variable mechanism and stores them in a certain folder. My application picks the templates up, converts to OO format, merges it with the data from the database, converts it back to Word and writes the files to a certain folder.

Works pretty good so far. A couple of issues I stumbled into:

• Editing the Word document by pasting a variable name from html (in my case the instructions page in the browser) gives weird Freemarker parse exceptions. Pasting as plain text workarounds the problem.
  
• In the supplied merge data the zip code field is separated by two spaces from the city name. However the final merged document contains one space. This is also the case if the data contains three spaces...
  
• Default error handling from Freemarker prints out to the console. There is documentation how to fix this, but requires more research.
• JODReports code is not well maintained. The code of the converter and the report are out of sync (watch the package names). Luckily this does not pose a problem when using it.
  

It is a bit of a pity that JODReports does not support callbacks. Now you have to pass in all data up front. It would be nicer if JODReports would do a callback asking for the value of a field. Reason is that I need to supply a couple of calculated fields. Now I have to supply them all up front, whilst perhaps none is used.