How to Read OpenOffice / LibreOffice Files from the Command Line

Let’s say you have edited a file in LibreOffice Writer, but later you access your computer remotely via SSH for example. You don’t really want to bother copying the file to your current machine, and rather just quickly check its content in the terminal. Is there a way?

Since odt files are just some zip files containing XML files, you could manually decompress the file, and open XML files, but there is a more convenient the program is called odt2txt. On an Ubuntu / Debian machine it can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install odt2txt

1	sudo apt-get install odt2txt

For basic usage, you just need to pass the filename as parameter:

odt2txt test.odt 

This is a test

odt2txt test.odt

This is a test

But there are also a few more options:

odt2txt 
odt2txt 0.4
Converts an OpenDocument or OpenOffice.org XML File to raw text.

Syntax:   odt2txt [options] filename

Options:  --raw         Print raw XML
          --encoding=X  Do not try to autodetect the terminal encoding, but
                        convert the document to encoding X unconditionally
                        To find out, which terminal encoding will be used in
                        auto mode, use --encoding=show
          --width=X     Wrap text lines after X characters. Default: 65.
                        If set to -1 then no lines will be broken
          --output=file Write output to file, instead of STDOUT
          --subst=X     Select which non-ascii characters shall be replaced
                        by ascii look-a-likes:
                           --subst=all   Substitute all characters for which
                                         substitutions are known
                           --subst=some  Substitute all characters which the
                                         output charset does not contain
                                         This is the default
                           --subst=none  Substitute no characters
          --version     Show version and copyright information

odt2txt

odt2txt 0.4

Converts an OpenDocument or OpenOffice.org XML File to raw text.

Syntax: odt2txt [options] filename

Options: --raw Print raw XML

--encoding=X Do not try to autodetect the terminal encoding, but

convert the document to encoding X unconditionally

To find out, which terminal encoding will be used in

auto mode, use --encoding=show

--width=X Wrap text lines after X characters. Default: 65.

If set to -1 then no lines will be broken

--output=file Write output to file, instead of STDOUT

--subst=X Select which non-ascii characters shall be replaced

by ascii look-a-likes:

--subst=all Substitute all characters for which

substitutions are known

--subst=some Substitute all characters which the

output charset does not contain

This is the default

--subst=none Substitute no characters

--version Show version and copyright information

This also wrote with ods (spreadsheets) and odp (presentations) files with ods2txt and odp2txt which are just symlinks pointing to the same program as odt2txt, namely odt2txt.odt2txt.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.