Re: [WIP] OpenOffice Exporter

[Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com>]

Hi Eric

Eric S Fraga <ucecesf@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> On Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:09:50 +0530, Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> I am working on a Org->OpenOffice/ODT exporter. 
>> 
>> This is a WIP announcement. I am posting this with an intention to hear
>> of and preferably avoid any parallell efforts.
>> 
>> I am basing it on org-html.el. 
>> 
>> As it stands now in my own work area, it can export an outline structure
>> and has support for
>> 
>> 1. character styles 
>>    - bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, code, verbatim
>> 
>> 2. paragraph styles
>>    - quote, verse, center, example and source code
>> 
>> 3. lists
>>    - numbered, bulleted and description lists
>> 
>> 4. table of contents
>> 
>> Still a long a way to go ...
>
> but sounds good so far.  Although org->html->OOo works fine, I would
> definitely like to remove the one unnecessary step.

Export should be as simple as C-c C-e o nothing more. That's what I have
defined as the default key binding for Open Office exporter.

> How are you going to handle images?  

I like this question. 

It looks like Org->html->OOo exporter falls short of expectations
atleast wrt working with images. This in itself will justify my
development efforts [1].

> I want to make sure that the document that is exported has images
> "inside" the document (as opposed to links), at least optionally, so
> that I can share documents properly.  Will this be possible?
>

Short answer:
Yes it is possible. 
I will make embedding images in the ODT document an optional feature.

Long answer:
I tried the Org->html>OOo route and I understand what you mean.

I 'hand edited' the resulting odt file the following way and was able to
accomplish what you desire.

1. Unzip it (dot file is just a *.zip archive)
2. Create Pictures folder within the Unzipped archive and copy over the
   needed images in to that folder.
3. Fixup META-INF/manifest.xml to contain entries for the images that
   moved over.
4. Update content.xml with the new path for the images.
5. Zip up the archive with an ODT extension.
6. The document is ready to be served.

Footnotes:

[1] There are some discussions about issues with cross-references +
bibliographic entries in the existing Org-><Intermediate Format>->ODT
conversion sequence. 

It would be good if the users record the limitations with such export
procedures in specific details in this thread.


> Thanks,
> eric