OOoPy 0.2 review
DownloadOOoPy is a Python library for modifying OpenOffice.org documents
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OOoPy is a Python library for modifying OpenOffice.org documents. It provides a set of transformations on the OOo XML format using the ElementTree XML Library.
Transformations included are a mail merge application and the concatenation of documents with formatting intact. The framework supports easy creation of new transformations.
OpenOffice.org (OOo) documents are ZIP archives containing several XML files. Therefore it is easy to inspect, create, or modify OOo documents. OOoPy is a library in Python for these tasks with OOo documents.
To not reinvent the wheel, OOoPy uses an existing XML library, ElementTree by Fredrik Lundh. OOoPy is a thin wrapper around ElementTree using Python's ZipFile to read and write OOo documents.
In addition to being a wrapper for ElementTree, OOoPy contains a framework for applying XML transforms to OOo documents. Several Transforms for OOo documents exist, e.g., for changing OOo fields (OOo Insert-Fields menu) or using OOo fields for a mail merge application. Some other transformations for modifying OOo settings and meta information are also given as examples.
Applications like this come in handy in applications where calling native OOo is not an option, e.g., in server-side Web applications.
Don't be alarmed by the Alpha-Status of the Software: Reading and writing of OOo documents is stable as well as most transforms.
The only problematic transform is mailmerge: The OOo format is well documented but there are ordering constraints in the body of an OOo document. I've not yet figured out all the tags and their order in the OOo body. Another known shortcoming of OOoPys mailmerge is the renumbering of body parts of an OOo document.
Individual parts (like e.g., frames, sections, tables) need to have their own unique names. After a mailmerge, there are duplicate names for some items. So far I'm renumbering only frames, sections, and tables. See the renumber objects at the end of ooopy/Transforms.py.
What's New in This Release:
The Concatenate code was refactored and cleaned up.
The Attribute_Changer API was generalized to Attribute_Access and the Pagecount transform was replaced by get_meta.
The Mailmerge transform now computes new page, paragraph, and character count meta information.
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