Unzipped opendoc files

users
#1

I seem to remember ... a long long time ago.
It was possible to use an unzipped open-doc file (a directory) as a zipped one.
So it was somehow possible to start-up open/libreoffice using as starting point one of the files in the unzipped directory.

Does anyone recall such a behaviour?
Is that still possible?

Michel K.

#2

The .odt file can be opened with a zip file viewer. Within the .zip file
there will be a file 'content.xml'. That file contains the actual text of
the original document with xml tags.

To reduce it to only the original text with no xml tags would require
stripping the tags. Don't know if there is a tool available to do that.

As for opening 'content.xml' directly in Open/LibreOffice that could be
accomplished by right clicking the 'content.xml' file, selecting the "Open
with..." option from the context menu and then selecting the desired
application. Remember however the xml tags are included in the document and
will be displayed in the Open/LibreOffice document.

#3

Oh, I'm not sure I made myself clear.
What I was asking is
Can soffice use a directory resulting from an unzip as if it were an odt
document?
Presumably all information of the document is in the directory.

So given the right starting point soffice or swriter or scalc should be able
to treat the directory as an odt document.

so normaly I would do something like

swriter thedocument.odt

but I could unzip "thedocument.odt" as otherplace/thedocument.odt (directory
name)

and do

swriter otherplace/thedocument.odt

and just be editing an unzipped odt document

Ok, it doesn't work like that but is there a way that it would?
So you might think.
What the f... is this guy thinking about?
Well I was thinking about using a standard SVC on such a directory.
Ok so LibreOffice does have a document version tracking functionality.
I was just wondering if there would be a way to do it 'old-style'.
Of course there would be a lot of problems working this way. (Most of all
the influence of any change would not be very clear)
I did not say it would be a smart way to work.
I just wanted to check if it would be possible at all.
:slight_smile:

#4

The functionality doesn't seem to be present in LibreOffice itself (at the
very least, it's not in obvious places).

But if you really want to use an SVC on the content, you could probably set
things using fuse-zip or something similar. It might not work very well
however, as LibreOffice enjoy having files in a certain order inside their
zip (especially the mimetype at the beginning).

All things considered, you might as well go with using the flat XML format,
which is slightly more SVC-friendly.

#5

If I understand what you're saying, you may be able to edit it, but
unless you save it elsewhere, your changes won't be saved. You can't
just open a zip, change something and then expect the changes to be
saved when you close the zipped file. You'd have to save the contents
somewhere and then zip them.

#6

I believe the idea is to have a file structure like this:

/home/foldername/Configurations2
/home/foldername/content.xml
/home/foldername/layout-cache
/home/foldername/manifest.rdf
/home/foldername/META-INF
/home/foldername/meta.xml
/home/foldername/mimetype
/home/foldername/Pictures
/home/foldername/settings.xml
/home/foldername/styles.xml
/home/foldername/Thumbnails

And to directly "open" it with libreoffice, using /home/foldername, without
zipping/unzipping the odt file.

#7

Yep that's exactly the idea.

Thank you for your answers everybody.
I think I know where to go now.