It takes a few lines of Ruby code to process OpenOffice.org document files: require 'rubygems' require 'rexml/document' require 'rexml/streamlistener' require 'zip/zipfilesystem' # install with gem include REXML class OOXmlHandler include StreamListener attr_reader :plain_text def initialize; @plain_text = ""; @last_tag_name =""; end def tag_start name, attrs; @last_tag_name = name; end def text s @plain_text end end class ReadOpenOffice attr_reader :text def initialize file_path Zip::ZipFile.open(file_path) { |zipFile| xml_handler = OOXmlHandler.new Document.parse_stream((zipFile.read('content.xml')), xml_handler) @text = xml_handler.plain_text } end end puts ReadOpenOffice.new('KBrecipes.odt').text I have spent too much of my time over the last 10 years dealing "programatically" with Microsoft document formats. I am tired of wasting my time when open docum...