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odfdo

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

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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.

  • 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.

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 3.14 (Linux, Mac, Windows). See previous releases for earlier versions of Python.

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 thepyproject.tomlfile for details. The project tries to keep up withlxml` 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 two .odt document.
  • odfdo-folder: convert standard ODF file to folder and files, and reverse.
  • odfdo-headers: print the headers of an ODF file.
  • odfdo-highlight: highlight the text matching a pattern (regex) in an ODF file.
  • odfdo-markdown: export text document in Markdown format to stdout.
  • odfdo-replace: find a pattern (regex) in an ODF file and replace by some string.
  • odfdo-show: dump text from an ODF file to the standard output, and optionally styles and meta informations.
  • odfdo-styles: command line interface tool to manipulate styles of ODF files.
  • odfdo-table-shrink: shrink tables to optimize width and height.
  • odfdo-userfield: show or set the user-field content in an ODF file.
  • odfdo-from-csv: import a CSV file into a .ods file.
  • odfdo-to-csv: export a .ods table to a CSV file.
  • odfdo-meta-print: print the metadata of an ODF file.
  • odfdo-meta-update: update the metadata of an ODF file.

tl;dr

‘Intended Audience :: Developers’

Documentation

  • the recipes folder contains more than 60 working sample scripts,
  • 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: 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, see: https://github.com/lpod/lpod-python

odfdo is an adaptation of this former project to Python 3.x with several improvements.