Preivew OpenOffice/LibreOffice .odt documents in Ranger File Manager

Quick tip for those that use the Ranger file manager (which is awesome, by the way).

Ranger file previews are defined in the scope.sh configuration file. You can add your own preview mechanisms here.

To preview .odt documents in Ranger, you’ll need to install the odt2txt tool. On Ubuntu (and presumably other debian-based distros) install it using the following command:

sudo apt install odt2txt

The odt2txt command converts a .odt document into a text file and outputs it to standard output (prints it to the terminal or makes it available to be piped).

In your scopes.sh file add the following within theĀ case “$extension” block.

odt)

odt2txt “$path” && fmt -s -w $width; exit 0;

Save the file and fire up a new instance of Ranger, then select a .odt file and you should get a text preview in the right pane.