OTT to TXT
Your document never leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make this work. That is worth more here than on most pages: a document is usually the one thing on a computer somebody would mind a stranger reading, and the ordinary way to convert one is to upload it to a company that then has it.
The words, with the structure that survives without markup.
Headings stay on their own lines, list bullets are kept, and table cells come out row by row. That is all plain text can hold, and the useful question is what it keeps rather than what it drops: a converter that returns one unbroken block of prose has technically given you the words and practically given you nothing.
A OpenDocument text template is a ZIP of XML, which is why this needs nothing
Rename a .ott to .zip and open
it: inside is the document as XML, its styles, its relationships and its
pictures as ordinary files. Your browser can already unzip — that is
what DecompressionStream is — and reading XML needs no
library. So the whole job happens here, with nothing fetched and nothing
uploaded.
An .ott is an .odt. It is the same ZIP, the same content.xml and the same elements, with one string different in the mimetype entry — …opendocument.text-template instead of …opendocument.text. Nothing here had to be written for it; the page exists because the file on your disk says .ott and you should not have to know that it does not matter. Everything below about styles applies unchanged.
What does not come across, and why
The page layout, deliberately: margins, page size, headers, footers, page numbers, columns and anything positioned on a page. None of that means anything in a document that reflows to fit a phone. Fonts, colours and sizes go the same way — what is kept is what they were expressing: a heading, a quotation, emphasis, a list.
Three things a OpenDocument text template can hold that do not survive, and you should know before you rely on this: tracked changes, comments and footnotes. A reviewed document converted here comes out as the text with the changes accepted and the discussion gone. If those matter, they have to come out of the original.
It does not open .doc — the pre-2007 Word format, which
is not a ZIP at all but a compound binary document, and a different job
entirely. Save it as .docx first and it will open here. It
does not open .pages, and it will tell you if you hand it a
spreadsheet or a presentation rather than failing silently.
Why there is no OTT to PDF here
Because it is not a conversion, it is typesetting. A PDF fixes text to a page of a particular size with particular margins and particular fonts, and something has to choose all of those and decide where every break falls. Your word processor already does that, with the choices in front of you, and its “export as PDF” is the right tool. A converter that made those decisions silently would have made them for you.
Where to go next
- OTT to HTML — the same document, another way out
- OTT to Markdown — the same document, another way out
- DOCX to TXT — the other format, the same way out