Merging two .odt files from code

Question

How do you merge two .odt files? Doing that by hand, opening each file and copying the content would work, but is unfeasable.

I have tried odttoolkit Simple API (simple-odf-0.8.1-incubating) to achieve that task, creating an empty TextDocument and merging everything into it:

private File masterFile = new File(...);

...

TextDocument t = TextDocument.newTextDocument();
t.save(masterFile);

...

for(File f : filesToMerge){
   joinOdt(f);
}

...

void joinOdt(File joinee){
   TextDocument master = (TextDocument) TextDocument.loadDocument(masterFile);
   TextDocument slave = (TextDocument) TextDocument.loadDocument(joinee);
   master.insertContentFromDocumentAfter(slave, master.getParagraphByReverseIndex(0, false), true);
   master.save(masterFile);
}

And that works reasonably well, however it looses information about fonts - original files are a combination of Arial Narrow and Windings (for check boxes), output masterFile is all in TimesNewRoman. At first I suspected last parameter of insertContentFromDocumentAfter, but changing it to false breaks (almost) all formatting. Am I doing something wrong? Is there any other way?

Answer 1

I think this is "works as designed".

I tried this once with a global document, which imports documents and display them as is... as long as paragraph styles have different names !

Using same named templates are overwritten with the values the "master" document have.

So I ended up cloning standard styles with unique (per document) names.

HTH

Answer 2

Ma case was a rather simple one, files I wanted to merge were generated the same way and used the same basic formatting. Therefore, starting off of one of my files, instead of an empty document fixed my problem.

However this question will remain open until someone comes up with a more general solution to formatting retention (possibly based on ngulams answer and comments?).