Terms and Conditions:

J. David Eisenberg wrote:Copyright (c) 2005 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Excerpts from the Preface:

OASIS OpenDocument Essentials introduces you to the XML that serves as an internal format for office applications. OpenDocument is the native format for OpenOffice.org, an open source, cross-platform office suite, and KOffice, an office suite for KDE (the K desktop environment).

Who Should Read This Book?

You should read this book if you want to extract data from OpenDocument files, convert your data to OpenDocument format, or simply find out how the format works.

If you need to know absolutely everything about the OpenDocument format, you should download the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0 in PDF form or as an OpenOffice.org 1.0 format file. That document was a major source of reference for this book.

Who Should Not Read This Book?

If you simply want to use OpenOffice.org or KOffice to create documents, you need only download the software from http://www.openoffice.org/ or http://www.koffice.org/ and start using it. There's no need for you to know what's going on behind the scenes unless you wish to satisfy your lively intellectual curiosity.