odr is a lightweight viewer for Open Document Format files. It's wildly hackish, and very incomplete, but it does a reasonable job of the 80% or so that actually matters.

I symlink ~/bin/odr to odr.py and invoke it like this:

  $ export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8
  ...
  $ odr some-file.odt | less -R

odr emits ANSI escapes for bold and underline [for headings], and one day might emit some colors too.

It works best when used with `less` like this -- although you need -R to enable interpretation of the escapes, and then since less isn't a TTY, python fails to determine that your terminal can do UTF8, so you need to force PYTHONIOENCODING, yay..

If you're hacking on odr, it might be useful to use --debug, to dump the element frequencies after the content; also --xml to include the xml elements directly in the (still somewhat-formatted) output. Note that --xml does alter layout by making some otherwise empty spans nonempty, etc.

There are various things that could be improved:

* Sequence handling only covers the very basics. odr handles only simple numeric alpha, and roman sequences. Alpha overflow past z/Z is not handled. text:formula is totally ignored, we just bump.

* The text wrapping is totally bogus for unicode. We should really be using unicode character properties to determine how much space things use.

* Text wrapping also doesn't interact well with escapes-- they should be treated as both (a) indivisible, and (b) zero-width.

* Maybe we should have an option to suppress the use of ANSI escapes.

* Anything we don't understand is treated as a "block-level" element.

* Tables are a pain. They don't behave like block-level elements, and they also don't behave like inline elements, and automatic column width is always just going to be a disaster. Nothing impossible here for someone sufficiently motivated (currently not me).

* It's possible to try WAY harder to get reasonable formatting in the console. We can do colors, italic, bold, underline, and other bletcherous things if someone cares about that.

Have fun, and please send me patches for things that suck so much that you've fixed them. ;)

-- Chris