Yeah, LaTex is awesome. I use it for all my personal witting, and school related stuff. My thesis was done with LaTex. I even made my defense presentation slides in it. :)

Also every syllabus, homework assignment and exam that I write is done in LaTex. I usually use Powerpoint for lecture presentations because I can then write on it using the SmartBoard, save it and republish edited lectures slides for the students. :)

My other job is a windows shop though, with everyone pretty much addicted to Office. So I have to deal with it.

Or you could use TeX! It isn’t WYSIWYG, nor is it as easy to jump into as Word, but there has never been a time using TeX that I thought “why the heck did it do that?”

http://incubator.openoffice.org/

this should be the place you need to go.

Well, I’m not sure you can do this by just submitting a patch to Oo.org. This is probably something that should be designed into the core document format support. This should be built as an integral feature of the ODF support.

I don’t think I’m the right guy to do this, but yeah – someone definitely could do it.

thats the beauty of open source. you can implement it.