Hopefully, the majority of templates you will need can be created painlessly with a word processor. Unfortunately, it’s sometimes required to create more complex templates. To make it possible, we will need to open .odt source and to write a template right there.
It is well known that Open Document (odt file) is nothing but a zipped directory with a bunch of XML-files and images. It is less known that the format of the package is rather straighforward and can be easily grasped without extensive manual learning.
If you try to unzip odt document, you will find a set of files like content.xml, manifest.rdf, meta.xml and so on inside. Usually, content.xml is the biggest file with all the content. Other files can be considered as auxiliaries.
Although ordinary XML, content.xml is not very convenient to observe, because usually word processors don’t insert line wraps between tags. One of the easiest way to make it eye-safe is to use “tidy” utility:
tidy -modify -xml -utf8 -indent content.xml
After that and throwing out all XML redundance, you see something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<office:document-content ....>
<office:body>
<office:text>
...
<text:p text:style-name="Standard">Hello {{ username }}, your
balance is {{ balance|floatformat:2 }}</text:p>
</office:text>
</office:body>
</office:document-content>
Finally, this is the template, ready to modify and use. You can apply all Django filters and tags inside, create loops, conditionals, etc. Behind the scene webodt unpacks .odt file, parse content.xml with Django template processor, zip everything back and then, if needed, passes resulting document through the backend to get the document in other format.
Although webodt doesn’t understand Django template loaders, Django templates surely do. It is possible to use template inheritance and template inclusion with no additional efforts from your side. All you have to do is to create the base template with the contents and blocks and place it into TEMPLATES_DIR directory. Then it’s enough to write in previously mentioned content.xml something like:
{% extends base_template.xml %}
{% block content %}
<text:p text:style-name="Standard">Hello {{ username }}, your
balance is {{ balance|floatformat:2 }}</text:p>
{% endblock %}