13.12.4 Extending ODT export

The ODT export back-end can produce documents in other formats besides ODT using a specialized ODT converter process. Its common interface works with popular converters to produce formats such as ‘doc’, or convert a document from one format, say ‘csv’, to another format, say ‘xls’.

Customize org-odt-convert-process variable to point to ‘unoconv’, which is the ODT’s preferred converter. Working installations of LibreOffice would already have ‘unoconv’ installed. Alternatively, other converters may be substituted here. See Configuring a document converter.

Automatically exporting to other formats

If ODT format is just an intermediate step to get to other formats, such as ‘doc’, ‘docx’, ‘rtf’, or ‘pdf’, etc., then extend the ODT export back-end to directly produce that format. Specify the final format in the org-odt-preferred-output-format variable. This is one way to extend (see ODT export commands).

Converting between document formats

The Org export back-end is made to be inter-operable with a wide range of text document format converters. Newer generation converters, such as LibreOffice and Pandoc, can handle hundreds of formats at once. Org provides a consistent interaction with whatever converter is installed. Here are some generic commands:

M-x org-odt-convert

Convert an existing document from one format to another. With a prefix argument, opens the newly produced file.