If you know python http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/PyUNO_bridge http://opendocumentfellowship.com/projects/odfpy For xml the choice is http://codespeak.net/lxml/ A native xml db, with XQuery and python binding http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/berkeley-db/xml/index.html And this is my experience : I'm programming in TeX (with context) , lua / python (they are similar) and xslt . For every project if I can I use lxml to manage xml sources, because it includes xslt but not viceversa. The goal is to translate xml in tex in the quickest way, and let mkiv to do the hard word. I have not a good feeling with xslt, because is not so powerful as lxml, and clearly is not a competitor of TeX . If I need storage, dbxml is good, and XQuery+lxml is powerful enought . OO has also docbook exporter http://www.docbook.org/ docbook is rich and with a good collection of xsl stylesheets to translate xml to html but maybe is ...too much . -- luigi