CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashlibreofficeopenoffice.org
wintermeyer
wintermeyer

Reputation: 8318

Fill an existing LibreOffice document with values from the command line

I run a bash script which generates a PDF at the end of a billing run. I used to do that with LaTeX but the users ask for a more MS Office like solution. So I'm thinking of using a LibreOffice document and use LibreOffice on the command line to generate the PDF. That works. But I have no idea how to inject the values I need to change (e.g. the address and the billing information) into that document before I can generate a PDF.

Let's assume the example.odt document contains this text:

Dear $fist_name,

you own us $amount USD.

Regards
xyz

Since example.odt is not really easy to edit from a Bash script I'm searching for an other way to inject values for $first_name and $amount.

What is the best way to do this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1023

Answers (1)

wintermeyer
wintermeyer

Reputation: 8318

The LibreOffice file is a zip archive which can be unzipped with 

unzip old.odt -d example
cd example

The content of the file is in the file content.xml. There is can be changed with sed or any other tool. After that the .odt file has to be created again:

zip -r ../new.odt .

After that the PDF can be created with this command (the path is from OS X):

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless 
--convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export --outdir ~/Desktop/ ~/Desktop/new.odt

Upvotes: 3

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