Over at the Emacs Notes blog there’s an interesting tutorial on how to style ODT output when exporting from Org-mode. The tutorial uses the “problem” of producing a manuscript for a novel. That’s a good example because literary publishers like to pretend that we’re still using typewriters and the manuscripts, in addition to having a highly stylized format, are most often rendered in Courier.
The tutorial shows an example of the output you’d get from Org normally and then the desired format you get after adding some XML definitions to your Org file. It’s very much like adding HTML definitions for exporting to the Web. The process is a bit complicated but the tutorial steps you through what has to be done.
Most of us aren’t writing novels, of course, but many of us do have to produce ODT files either as an end product or to accommodate our colleagues. That’s not a problem until the document needs special formatting. This tutorial tells you how to make a style sheet to do this. If you’re producing the same type of document many times, you need only to do this once.
If you’re interested in learning how to control the formatting of Org-mode ODT output, this tutorial is definitely worth taking a look at. The author did a lot of research and hunted up information that’s hard to find. Reading it will save you a lot of time.