Hi Thomas,
process the odt directly; instead, I want to transform the xml via xslt to a simplified format and then process that with ConTeXt. I have just discovered the tool xalan ( http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/index.html ) which allows me to use an xslt style sheet and direct the output to a new file. I will then need to clean up these xml files and write a mkiv xml setup for them.
So for those who know much more about this sort of workflow: does that make sense?
Yes, it does. At my company we clean up (and reorganize) XML data with XSLT all the time. We are happy users of saxon 9 (http://saxon.sourceforge.net/) which is an xslt 2.0 engine. Learning XSLT is not trivial (but not too hard either), but once you get an understanding of it nobody can stop you using XSLT for 'everything'. Patrick -- ConTeXt wiki and more: http://contextgarden.net