The purpose of this library is to traverse the contents of an ODF file using so called XML stream reading. The library contains a recursive descent parser for ODF contents. At the time of this writing only an ODT parser is available but later we will provide parsers for all of the ODF document types. Much of the actual contents use the same XML elements so supporting a new document type is not a lot of work.

During the parsing functions are called in a backend class that the programmer should subclass in order to provide specific output from the parser. A so called reader context (OdfReaderContext) is maintained and passed to all functions in the backend class. This class should also be subclassed. For a very simple example, see the text export filter in filters/words/ascii/AsciiExport.cpp.