Re: Typesetting LibreOffice (ODT) documents with ConTeXt

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

On 01/30/2013 10:12 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Bill Meahan wrote:
>
>> An XSLT stylesheet would allow direct export of a document from
>> LO-W which could then be be tweaked if necessary.
>
> Another option is to uncompress the odt file (IIUC, it is just a
> zip), and process it directly in ConTeXt
> (http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/xml-mkiv.pdf).
>
> This approach is more flexible than XSLT stylesheets, but it ties you
> to ConTeXt (with XSLT, in principle, you can switch to other formats
>  relatively easily).
>
> In essence it boils down to understanding the ODT XML Schema and
> figuring out the mapping to context commands.
>

I am no expert here, but I have tried this approach a while ago when I
was typesetting an edited volume. The authors sent me MS Word files, 
which I saved as OOO. But the xml in open office was just too messy to 
deal with. It doesn't provide logical structure, but tries to recreate 
the visual output, so you get dozens of different <span type="this"> and 
<span type="that"> elements which may be completely irrelevant. And 
whenever I thought I had figured out what some cryptic abbreviation 
(say, <span font="T6">) meant ("italic"), I then learnt that in the next 
document I opened, it may mean something completely different. I would 
be interested in finding a fully automated work flow, but I'm somewhat 
sceptical that it exists. And don't even think about round-trip 
conversion, I don't think this will be possible.

Just my 2 cents.

Thomas
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