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Is it possible to build a LibreOffice document from code similar to the way a web page is built from HTML and CSS? Can one write an ODF file in which the content and styling are separate, and then/view open in LibreOffice? If so, can one write the code in a text editor as done for HTML/CSS?

There area two reasons I now ask. 1) When I need to make a style change in LibreOffice I have to manually make the same adjustments in a hundred places, such as changing the style of block quotes. 2) I'd like to build documents from a database of text.

I found a question on this in relation to databases but it was about eight years old.

Thank you for any direction you may be able to provide.

Gary
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    Didi you check the information available at https://opendocumentformat.org/developers/ regarding the OpenDocument file format? There's plenty of documentation available how to build an ODT file programmatically. – tohuwawohu Apr 23 '22 at 08:19
  • @tohuwawohu Thank you. I had not seen that site. Your screen name: Genesis 1:2 Hebrew? Void and without form? – Gary Apr 23 '22 at 21:09
  • exactly, that's correct :-) – tohuwawohu Apr 24 '22 at 07:01

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Unzip an .odt file that contains styles. You will see two files, content.xml and styles.xml. Edit these files using a text editor and then zip the folder back up to get a modified .odt file.

Be aware that there are two types of styles in the XML files. Named styles are what most people think of as styles, whereas automatic styles are custom formatting, like when you select some text and change the font directly.

The link from tohuwawohu describes utilities to work programmatically with the file. Also as mentioned in the link, it's not too hard to write code yourself. For example in python, import the built-in libraries zipfile and xml.etree.

Jim K
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  • Thank you. Your closing paragraph is what I'm looking to do, if realistic. I want to write the code rather than using another tool to manipulate the ODF, or build the ODF from the database content. – Gary Apr 23 '22 at 21:12