+++ Sunday 15 June 2025 +++


Back to generating FODT
=======================

For us, users of Open Source software, there are always
some challenges to collaborate with the rest of the world,
jailed by propriety solutions created by Microsoft or
Apple.

For years, I could send simple ODT-files to the publisher.
I wrote my articles in org-mode, and when ready, I used the
Emacs org-mode export functionality to create an ODT-file
from my org-mode text.

Now, the publisher requires a specific ODT-template (well,
actually, it is a MS Word docx template). It looks like a
handmade template, presumably geared towards easy
conversion for their publishing software. This templates
has many different elements, and for each element a
different style.

I tried to adapt the org-mode export functionality to
export into this new format, but the many different
elements and the use of their own names of the styles is a
big hurdle. In the end, I decided to abandon this route and
looked at writing an exporter myself.

FODT
----
The "Flat XML ODF"-File format is a format for ODT
documents. It consists of a single file, and uses the file
extension "fodt".

The more complex ODT-format consists of zip archive with
multiple XML files.

Compared to the ODT-format is much easier to generate a
FODT-file.

Simple org files
----------------
The articles are just headers, text and code, no tables or
any other fancy stuff. There are only three levels of
headers, the first level is just the title of the article,
the second level just the subtitle. The third level headers
are the headers that break up the text in chunks, to
prevent a wall of text, guiding the eye, and making the
article easier to read.

Because of this, writing an exporter to fodt seems doable.

Plan of attack
--------------
I took the "template" (just an example file they created in
MS Word), opened it in Libreoffice and saved it as a
fodt-file. After some analyzing I came to the following
plan of attack:

* Manually create a file with the different elements in it,
  and tune this until Libreoffice opens it without
  complaining.
* Add some entries in the org-structure-template-alist to
  quickly add some blocks fenced with tokens like
  `#+begin_intro' and `#+end_intro'.
* Create a parser that recognizes the elements in the
  org-mode file and call a function on each element and
  generate the text to export.
* Put the the XML intro and outro around the generated text.
* Test and tune until Libreoffice is happy with the resulting
  fodt-file.

In the past, I wrote a small elisp script that parses an
org mode file (actually, a denote org file) and exports it
into my phlog-format, so I could re-use that.

It works
--------
The after some trial-and-error I got a working elisp
script. Libreoffice opens the exported fodt-file without
complaining.

Fodt is XML, special chars in the text have to be treated
so they don't break the XML-code.
Special chars, like `<', `>', and `&' have to be converted,
and probably some others too. For this, I still must add
some functionality to the elisp script, but that shouldn't
be too hard (famous last words).


Last edited: $Date: 2025/06/15 08:49:59 $