Introduction

Introduction

Unlike specific APIs, OdfPy is essentially an abstraction layer just above the XML format. It provides a way to programmatically interact with the XML elements in OpenDocument files (ODF file). This means that creating or editing ODF files using OdfPy is an exercise in:

• Creating elements of the appropriate type, attributes and content.
• Finding elements of a certain type and changing their attributes and/or content.

Background

The main focus of OdfPy has been to prevent the programmer from creating invalid documents. It has checks that raise an exception if the programmer adds an invalid element, adds an attribute unknown to the grammar, forgets to add a required attribute or adds text to an element that doesn't allow it.

About OpenDocument

An OpenDocument file is essentially an XML structure split into four XML files in a zip-file. If you unzip the file, you’ll see content.xml, styles.xml, meta.xml and settings.xml. Odfpy handles these as one memory structure, which you can use the API to navigate. From within the XML you can refer to images, and add them to the zip-archive. Finally, OpenDocument keeps track of all this via a META-INF/manifest.xml file (the manifest) containing the official files of the document.

Creating a document

You start the document by instantiating one of the OpenDocumentChart, OpenDocumentDrawing, OpenDocumentImage, OpenDocumentPresentation, OpenDocumentSpreadsheet or OpenDocumentText classes.

All of these provide properties you can attach elements to:

• meta
• scripts
• fontfacedecls
• settings
• styles
• automaticstyles
• masterstyles
• body

Additionally, the OpenDocumentText class provides the text property, which is where you add your text elements. A quick example probably is the best approach to give you an idea.

Example

from odf.opendocument import OpenDocumentText
from odf.style import Style, TextProperties
from odf.text import H, P, Span

textdoc = OpenDocumentText()
# Styles
s = textdoc.styles
h1style = Style(name="Heading 1", family="paragraph")
h1style.addElement(TextProperties(attributes={'fontsize':"24pt",'fontweight':"bold" }))
s.addElement(h1style)
# An automatic style
boldstyle = Style(name="Bold", family="text")
boldprop = TextProperties(fontweight="bold")
boldstyle.addElement(boldprop)
textdoc.automaticstyles.addElement(boldstyle)
# Text
h=H(outlinelevel=1, stylename=h1style, text="My first text")
textdoc.text.addElement(h)
p = P(text="Hello world. ")
boldpart = Span(stylename=boldstyle, text="This part is bold. ")
p.addElement(boldpart)
p.addText("This is after bold.")
textdoc.text.addElement(p)
textdoc.save("myfirstdocument.odt")

You now have your first script-produced document called “myfirstdocument.odt”.