Comment 9 for bug 244098

I have reproduced the installation failure with the writer2latex 0.5-6 package in hardy 8.04, and can confirm that the writer2latex 0.5-6ubuntu0.1 package in hardy-proposed, with the fixed dependencies pulling in tex-common (which provides update-udpmap), successfully completes installation.

However, once writer2latex is installed, I am unable to convert even the most basic of openoffice documents. Running w2l from the command line gives me:

$ w2l -latex test_document.odt

This is Writer2LaTeX, Version 0.5 (2007-10-15)

Starting conversion...
Converting test_document.odt

String index out of range: 0
java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index out of range: 0
   at java.lang.String.charAt(libgcj.so.81)
   at java.io.File.getParent(libgcj.so.81)
   at java.io.File.mkdirs(libgcj.so.81)
   at java.io.File.mkdirs(libgcj.so.81)
   at writer2latex.Application.convertFile(Application.java:249)
   at writer2latex.Application.doConversion(Application.java:216)
   at writer2latex.Application.main(Application.java:112)

Attempting to use it as an export filter from openoffice.org also doesn't work; oowriter claims that it's missing a jre and needs openoffice.org-java-common installed. After that gets installed, export to latex still doesn't work and the following is dumped to the terminal:

$ Error:java.util.zip.ZipException: /usr/lib/openoffice/program/classes/writer2latex.jar (No such file or directory)
Error:java.lang.NullPointerException

Making a symlink from /usr/share/writer2latex/writer2latex.jar to /usr/lib/openoffice/program/classes/writer2latex.jar still causes export to fail with the following output to the terminal:

$ Error:java.io.FileNotFoundException: No entry for META-INF/converter.xml exists.
Error:java.lang.NullPointerException

I'm thus not convinced that releasing this updated package will produce something usable for the user.