Joaquim Rocha
Published on

ODFPY

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    Name
    Joaquim Rocha
    Twitter
  • Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft
ODFellowship

From last Wednesday I’ve been in a quest to find out a lazy/easy way of producing an ODT document using Python for a project I am working on. I wanted to use some module, something to make it easy for me… I didn’t find one! I even asked in programming forums and some people told me to use Py-UNO… not quite what I wanted either!

Eventually I gave up and built an ODT myself, based on a blank one I saved with OpenOffice.org. It worked fine but it was looking raw and not optimized since instead of reading the 2,000 page ODF documentation from OASIS I tried to figure it out myself from the xml files of the blank ODT.

So, when I was about to go to bed and dream about my stupid/noob way of generating ODTs I stumbled in a web page that was called, guess what? ODFPY!!! Believe me, I think I ran through all combinations of the words “python”, “odf”, “odt”, “generate”… in my intense search and I only found the ODFPY page when I was no longer searching for it! Anyway, I put all my work behind my back and got into ODFPY module.

ODFPY is a useful/time sparing module published under GNU LGPL license by OpenDocument Fellowship.

Thanks to the ODFPY folks!