Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 21st Aug 2006 19:02 UTC, submitted by Mark Daher
"You've built a linux desktop. You've mounted the learning curve to configure the hardware (or paid someone else to do so) and you are able to do your own work on the machine. You've discovered that if you can point and click you can run a modern linux OS on your desktop. But how is it you will ever relate to the rest of the world? What do you do with the MS attachments people send you? How do you enjoy the music distributed in formats for a Windows World?"
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Member since:
2006-01-19
It is absolutely easy to write an application which allows you to create, read or modify an ODF file.
) which quickly searches through an ODF file.
The ODF file itself is just a zipped directory structure. In windows you can rename myDocu.odt to myDocu.zip and unzip the file with WinZip or any other zip tool you want. I once did that just for fun, it really works!
What you get is a directory structure where all the things are stored in ASCII (or unicode, I don't know) XML. Embedded things like pictures are stored as png or jpeg files in subdirectories.
If you find out what which XML tag means and does (and this is publicly documented) you can write your own ODF modifying/creating/reading application. Free languages like python might even already provide toolchains for manipulating ODF files (although I know nothing definitively).
If you want to grep ODF documents in Linux you will likely find a way to write a simple shell script (named odfgrep