I am involved in the creation of a publication for a non-profit. It is an organization which provides Christian worship services at area 18 elder care facilities (nursing homes, assisted care facilities, etc.). The publication must be customized to have the service time for each facility. There is one publication per week, so it must be customized to have the week dates. We have services over three days (Tuesday-Thursday) and they were at five different times. I have been using LibreOffice to create the documents and then converting them to PDFs and emailing them to the facilities for printing copies for the people who attend the services. I would produce a month at a time. I used fields in the LibreOffice Open-Document-Text (ODT) documents to make editing the dates and times simpler, but this was still taking several hours to complete the job each month. Then the program director came up with two more times. And then two more. This was way too much tediousness for an old guy like me. Too many opportunities for mistakes. Too boring. Let's automate it!

I have done a lot of VBA programming in Microsoft Office tools in the past. I have been poking around the edges of programming in LibreOffice with Uno and Python since the early days, but I always quit because the documentation was too shallow, complexity too deep and patience too short. Then, in my latest spurt of motivation, I ran into this post by Philip at PySpoken.com. It suggested a different approach of unpacking the ODT document (it is really just a zip file), editing the XML contents and then repacking it into a changed ODT document. I had never thought of approaching it this way. It turns out it works beautifully. In addition, Philip recommended the unoconv project for converting the .ODT document to PDF using LibreOffice. Dag Wieers created unoconv. It seems to work well enough, but may be a bit fussy about errors, so I put in a retry mechanism for its use, to ensure the output actully got created. Overall, thanks Philip for giving me the pieces to get this job done!

I used Python 3.6 for this. F-strings are used. ;-)

Find a blog post about this project here. Also have a look at the Faith, Hope and Peace Ministries website (where you can read these devotions).

An example input Devotion ODT document and output ODT and PDF documents is included here for reference.

I decided to generalize my approach, so that it could handle additional days being added. Very little would be hard-coded, but the code would figure out what to do. It does assume it is being run the month prior to the document's target dates and at least 3 days into that prior month. It expects to find 4 or 5 documents of the form Devotion-1.odt ... Devotion-4.odt. The number depends on how many weeks our target days hit in that next month. The way to count this is the number of times our starting weekday occurs in the month. As it stands, we start on Tuesday, so if there are 5 Tuesdays in a month, there will be 5 documents for that month. I don't divide the week if it ends on Tuesday or Wednesday; whatever our date range is. Only the starting weekday matters. Now, I did set parameters based on a couple of data structures declared up top. These could theoretically be loaded from a data file.