How does Open Office compress its files?

Question

I\'m trying to create an Open Office spreadsheet programmatically but for some reason simply compressing a folder with all the necessary files makes Open Office flag the fil

Answer 1

The shell script worked for me, too :) I had problems zipping back up, after unzipping an odt file. Guess the manifest part was what's missing.

The shell script above did not handle inline pictures/graphics, however, so I made some small adjustments which worked for me (also, the script had a bug in that END_HEREDOC was not on a dedicated line):

#!/bin/sh

# Convert folder (unzipped OpenDocument file) to OpenDocument file (odt, ods, etc.)
# Usage: ./folder2od.sh "path/to/folder" "file.odt"

cmdfolder=$(cd `dirname "$0"`; pwd -P)
folder=$(cd `dirname "$2"`; pwd -P)
file=$(basename "$2")
absfile="$folder/$file"

cd "$1"
zip -0 -X "$file" "mimetype"

list=$(cat <<'END_HEREDOC'
meta.xml
settings.xml
content.xml
Pictures/
Thumbnails/
Configurations2/
styles.xml
manifest.rdf
META-INF/manifest.xml
END_HEREDOC
)

for f in $list
do
    zip -r "$absfile" "$f"
done

cd "$cmdfolder"