I’m using the Perl module ODF::lpOD to add content to a template ODF document that I created using LibreOffice. The template contains, among other things, a table:

In the template, I enabled right-alignment in the rightmost row, but when I set the value of the cell using $cell->set_text($number), the alignment gets reset to left.

The closest I have come to a solution was creating a new style:

my $s = odf_create_style(
    'table cell',
    name    => 'right-aligned-style',
);
$s->set_properties(
    area    => 'paragraph',
    align   => 'right',
);

and then assigning this style to the cell:

$cell->set_text($number);
$cell->set_style('right-aligned-style');

This does indeed achieve the alignment I want, but it removes the borders:

If I try to add the borders to the above style, I can, but they are in smaller box and clearly not where they should be.

It’s normally possible to “clone” a style, but apparently it’s not possible to clone a table cell style, otherwise I would clone the existing style and then simply change/add the alignment property.

Does anyone have the magic incantation to get this working?

I created a sample ODF document and an demonstration script which will open the document, set the value of cell B1, set a new style for cell B1, and then write a new document file.

The document contains a sample 2×2 table with 0.5pt borders. Cell B1 is right-aligned, not that it does any good. The document can be retrieved using this URL:

Link to sample document

The script below will set the value of cell B1 and also set the table cell style, but as I explained above, this removes the previous style from the cell and thus the borders disappear.

By default the script expects the sample input document to be in “./doc-with-table-ra.odt” and will write the output document to “./demo-ra-document.odt”. These can be overridden with -input <file> and -output <file>. The script expects that ODF::lpOD be available somewhere in Perl’s search path.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Getopt::Long;

use ODF::lpOD;

my $template_document_file = './doc-with-table-ra.odt';
my $output_document_file = './demo-ra-document.odt';

GetOptions(
    'input=s'    => $template_document_file,
    'output=s'   => $output_document_file,
) || die "error with options";

-f $template_document_file || die "template [$template_document_file] not found";

# open template

print "open [$template_document_file] ...n";
my $doc = odf_document->get($template_document_file) or die "failed to load template";
my $body = $doc->get_body;

# create table cell style with right alignment

print "create and register new table cell style...n";
my $tc_style_name = 'right-justified-table';
my $tc_style = odf_create_style(
    'table cell',
    name    => $tc_style_name,
);
$tc_style->set_properties(
    area    => 'paragraph',
    align   => 'right',
);
$doc->register_style($tc_style);

# fetch table

print "fetch table...n";
my $table = $body->get_table_by_name('Table1');

# set a value in cell 'B1' (row=0, column=1)

print "get cell object...n";
my $cell = $table->get_cell(0, 1);

# set value of cell

my $value = 123.4;
print "set cell value to [$value]n";
$cell->set_text('123.4');

# assign style to cell

print "set cell style...n";
$cell->set_style($tc_style_name);

# write output document

print "save modified document to [$output_document_file]n";
$doc->save(target => $output_document_file);

exit 0;