odfdo

OpenDocument Format (ODF, ISO/IEC 26300) library for Python

odfdo is a Python library for programmatically creating, parsing, and editing OpenDocument Format (ODF) files. It provides an interface for interacting with .odt, .ods, .odp, and other ODF file types. The library comes with a set of utilities and recipes for common actions to make it easier to use.

odfdo saves documents as ODF 1.4 and can load documents created with ODF 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 or 1.4.

• Document Creation: Generate new ODF documents.
• Content Manipulation: Add, modify, or delete text, paragraphs or tables.
• Table Operations: Create, populate, and modify tables.
• Style Management: Control formatting through different ways.
• Drawing and Presentation: Less advanced features, but allow work with elements in .odg and .odp files.
• Metadata: Read and write document metadata.

Project: https://github.com/jdum/odfdo

Author: jerome.dumonteil@gmail.com

License: Apache License, Version 2.0

odfdo is a derivative work of the former lpod-python project.

Installation

Installation from Pypi (recommended):

pip install odfdo

Installation from sources:

uv sync

After installation from sources, you can check everything is working. The tests should run for a few seconds and issue no error. Test coverage should be close to 100%.

uv sync --dev
uv run pytest -n8

To generate the documentation in the ./docs directory:

uv sync --group doc
uv run python doc_src/generate_doc.py

Dependencies

The project is tested on Python 3.10 to 3.15 (Linux, Mac, Windows). See previous releases for earlier versions of Python. For Python 3.9, see branch support/python39.

A special effort has been made to limit the dependencies of this library: the only (non-development) dependency is lxml. The required versions of lxml depend mainly on the version of Python used; see the pyproject.toml file for details. The project tries to keep up with lxml version updates regularly.

Usage Overview

Creating a "Hello world" Text Document

from odfdo import Document, Paragraph

doc = Document("text")
doc.body.append(Paragraph("Hello world!"))

doc.save("hello.odt")

Modifying a Spreadsheet

from odfdo import Document

doc = Document("existing_spreadsheet.ods")
sheet = doc.body.get_sheet(0)

print(f"Value of A1: {sheet.get_cell('A1').value}")
sheet.set_value("B2", "Updated Value")

doc.save("modified_spreadsheet.ods")

Utilities

A few scripts are provided with odfdo:

• odfdo-diff: show a diff between the textual content of two ODT files.
• odfdo-folder: convert a standard ODF file (zip archive) to a folder structure, or convert a folder structure back to an ODF file.
• odfdo-flat: convert an ODF file (zip archive or folder) to a flat XML ODF file, or convert a flat ODF XML file back to an ODF zip file.
• odfdo-headers: display the hierarchical headers (headings) of an ODF text document. The headers are printed with their numbering and can be limited by a specified depth.
• odfdo-highlight: search for a regular expression pattern in an ODF text document and apply a highlighting style to the matching text. The style can include italic, bold, text color, and background color.
• odfdo-markdown: convert an ODF text or spreadsheet document to Markdown format and print to standard output.
• odfdo-replace: find and replace text in an ODF file using a regular expression pattern.
• odfdo-show: display various parts of an ODF document, including text content, styles, and metadata, to standard output or a specified directory.
• odfdo-styles: manipulate styles within OpenDocument files: display, delete, or merge them.
• odfdo-table-shrink: optimize the width and height of tables in an ODF spreadsheet by removing empty trailing rows and columns.
• odfdo-userfield: inspect and modify user-defined fields within an ODF document.
• odfdo-from-csv: import data from a CSV file into a new ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) file.
• odfdo-to-csv: export a table from an ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) file to a CSV file.
• odfdo-from-json: import data from a JSON file into a new ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) file.
• odfdo-to-json: export one or all tables from an ODF document to a JSON file.
• odfdo-meta-print: extract and display the metadata from an ODF file.
• odfdo-meta-update: update the metadata of an ODF file by merging from a JSON file or stripping to minimal content.

tl;dr

'Intended Audience :: Developers'

Documentation

• The recipes folder contains over 80 examples of functional scripts, including interoperability recipes for Pandas, Polars, PyExcel, DuckDB, Tabulate, NumPy, and OpenPyXL.
• The auto-generated documentation exposes public APIs and recipes.

Online documentation: https://jdum.github.io/odfdo

About styles

The best way to apply style is by merging styles from a template document into your generated document (See odfdo-styles script). Styles are a complex matter in ODF, so trying to generate styles programmatically is not recommended. Several recipes provide an example of manipulating styles, including: change_paragraph_styles_methods.py,create_basic_text_styles, add_text_span_styles.

Related project

If you work on .ods files (spreadsheet), you may be interested by these scripts using this library to parse/generate .ods files with style management: https://github.com/jdum/odsgenerator and https://github.com/jdum/odsparsator

Former lpod-python library

lpod-python was written in 2009-2010 as a Python 2.x library. odfdo is an adaptation of this former project to Python 3.x with several improvements.