Omegacrash

I was recently given a form to fill out that was in MS Word format. As a Debian user I of course used OpenOffice.org to open it (Debian's stable release doesn't have LibreOffice).

While I don't expect Word files to import perfectly into OpenOffice, I was flummoxed by the way the form fields were imported. Instead of editable fields, they were grayed-out sequences of space characters. These could be edited, but not very conveniently. I also couldn't find any way to convert them to the normal OpenOffice input fields. There was no indication that the application had any way of identifying or changing the field type.

Since OpenDocument files are just zip files with XML to define the document structure, it wasn't too hard to find the XML markup for the problem fields. The fields were identified with the tags <field:fieldmark-start/> and <field:fieldmark-end/>, and a few minutes on Google suggested that these are an extension specifically for MS Word compatibility.

Fortunately I found a (sort of) convenient way to convert these fields. First, I discovered that OpenOffice can save in a format that I didn't know about before: a flat XML version of OpenDocument. This makes editing or just viewing the XML much more convenient. It even produces nicely indented XML rather than the one huge line of text you get if you unzip an ODF file.

After converting to this format, all I had to do was open it in Vim and search for all the instances of the fieldmark tags, replacing them with the OpenDocument text-input tag, <text:text-input text:description=""/>. The description text corresponds to the field name, and the element text can be used to provide an initial value for the field.

The resulting file can be opened in OpenOffice and saved as a normal ODF. This could be a very handy tool for sticky OpenOffice/LibreOffice formatting issues, something that isn't too far removed from everyone's favorite feature from WordPerfect, Reveal Codes.