Meld nor diffuse merge will read my .odt files as text

[wclarowe]

When I try to compare .odt files using meld i geat the error message file appears to be bainary. When I try using Diffuse, it shows the files in code, not as text.
Any ideas?

[atreyu]

I didn't think any Linux utilities existed to do that kind of thing. Certainly meld has failed me in the past, in that regard. A quick look brought up Deltawalker, which sounds promising, though I'm not sure what the deal is with versions/pricing.

[drl]

Hi.

The odt and other formats from {open,libre}office are really packages of files. For example, looking at an unzipped odt file of a Hello, world line, one sees the collection of objects (using utility tree):

|-- Configurations2
|   |-- accelerator
|   |   `-- current.xml
|   |-- floater
|   |-- images
|   |   `-- Bitmaps
|   |-- menubar
|   |-- popupmenu
|   |-- progressbar
|   |-- statusbar
|   |-- toolbar
|   `-- toolpanel
|-- META-INF
|   `-- manifest.xml
|-- Thumbnails
|   `-- thumbnail.png
|-- content.xml
|-- manifest.rdf
|-- meta.xml
|-- mimetype
|-- settings.xml
`-- styles.xml

So what did you want meld to compare for you?

If it was the content -- which is what I would probably want -- you can use:

Name
       loconvert - Commandline Document Converter Using LibreOffice
...

which will produce the plain-text version of the file if you were to use, for example:

loconvert hello1.odt hello1.txt
loconvert hello2.odt hello2.txt

and then you could use meld on the resulting text files.

Other than that, it is not clear what you might want.

Best wishes ... cheers, drl