I have a website with lots of ODT files. HTML seems to have stopped opening these. It downloads them instead. Is this a known issue? Do I need to convert all the ODT files to DOC format to enable them to be opened directly from the site?
This is standard config for most sites, if you are not working in special environments like CollaboraOffice etc.
It is possible to integrate some kind of viewer in server-configurations or even download and open via browser (as often seen for pdf), but this is no standard - neither html, nor Apache/nginx…
I think it might be a browser setting. Firefox recently changed my settings for odt to download only. I had to go into options and change it back to always ask.
I’m not by my computer now but I think it has also changed where the temporary file is downloaded, to from temp to download.
Many thanks for the prompt response. I feared the problem might be the browser.
While that will stop my downloads folder getting clogged up with everything I test
while working on the site, it will put people off exploring the contents of the site.
The site contains an extensive archive of correspondence, documents, photographs, etc.
It’s there to provide ready access to this material.
Maybe I’ve got to convert everything to PDF. A lot of work.
20 Apr 2022, 11:41 by noreply@ask.libreoffice.org:
I think using an HTML server for archival of private documents of various formats is not well suited to the task. A web server is intended to serve a set of pages usually in HTML (for fixed contents) or PHP/Python/… for dynamic contents.
Have you considered installing an FTP server? FTP will not display file contents but it is really efficient for transferring files. Note that recent browsers have dropped FTP support and you must use other utilities. If you’re under Linux, file browsers continue to offer FTP support: just enter ftp://user@host/ where you enter a filename.
Convert to HTML - for this it was invented. PDF is useful to archive the visual impression of the document, but don’t reflow to fit your screen.
I’ve got PDF versions where it’s appropriate. But there are a lot of instances where the handwriting is difficult to decipher, so I’ve had to create ODT versions. I’ve never tried conversion to HTML. I’ll give it a go. Just 200 letters to do.
Many thanks for the suggestion. It’s much appreciated.
You can use Firefox as a browser, in the settings of which it is possible to select save / open depending on the type of file (see also @EarnestAl 's answer).
Many thanks for your suggestions but this is beyond my technical expertise, so there would be a long learning curve for me here. I’m not on Linux.
My aim has been to generate material suitable for reading on-line. So, for instance, the letters can be listed by author or date-range (via PHP) and the user can just click to read them. This list of letters is a mix of ODT and PDF files, occasionally both. It’s not really intended for download, though the user would always be able to save copies.
Well, I’ve tried various online ODT to HTML conversion sites. They really struggled with images, square brackets and footnotes. And the HTML they created was horrendous.
I tried saving as HTML from Libre Office and it resulted in Microsoft Edge being installed!!!
Windows 10 won’t let me delete this but there’s ways round that.
I tried downloading and installing SoftBoost. This seemed to do a better job than the online conversion sites and it will process upto 10 files at a time. But again the HTML it generated - well I’m not going to attempt making the necessary changes to it.
There’s not much variation in what goes into a letter, so I’m left with creating an HTML template
and then just copying into this from my ODT files. I’ve managed 4 of these so far.
Such is life!
But thanks for the suggestions.
20 Apr 2022, 18:25 by noreply@ask.libreoffice.org:
Sorry - as Edge is the default browser in Win10 and also a forced install for Win7 I have to assume, you have no clue what’s going on …
Good look for you project. But obviously I can’t help…