odt2txt lacks support for flat xml formats

[PeterPall]

Binary package hint: odt2txt

Please add support for the flat xml formats from libreoffice to odt2txt.

Background:
Normally the files produces by openoffice are a zip-archive containing a directory tree that represents the document object model of the file. In other words it contains a direcory structure with
 - a file containing the text
 - cascading stylesheets containing the formatting
 - and all images included inside the file
 This is a rather elegant structure and saves space on the hard disk since the file is compressed.

If you work with version control (Bazaar, Subversion, Mercurial and the like) this compression has a drawback, though: Normally version control only keeps track of all the changes that occour to a file. And normally only a small portion of a big file changes at once. But if the file is compressed - changes are high that evenaltering a single byte will change the whole compressed file.

To avoid this problem libreoffice allows to save documents as "flat XML file" (.fodt, .fods etc.) which is a uncompressed xml file containing the whole document object model the zip archive would. But they allow for effective version control which makes them useful enough that an easy way of converting them would make sense.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: odt2txt 0.4+git20100620-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Apr 13 22:26:09 2011
SourcePackage: odt2txt
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Andrej Shadura (andrew.sh)]

See also: https://github.com/dstosberg/odt2txt/pull/4/