--- a/tools/rst2odt_prepstyles.py
+++ b/tools/rst2odt_prepstyles.py
@@ -12,7 +12,15 @@
 #
 # Author: Michael Schutte <michi@uiae.at>
 
-from lxml import etree
+try:
+    from xml.etree import ElementTree as etree
+except ImportError:
+    try:
+        from elementtree import ElementTree as etree
+    except ImportError:
+        raise ImportError('Missing an implementation of ElementTree. ' \
+                'Please install either Python >= 2.5 or ElementTree.')
+
 import sys
 import zipfile
 from tempfile import mkstemp
@@ -27,12 +35,22 @@
 def prepstyle(filename):
     
     zin = zipfile.ZipFile(filename)
-    styles = zin.read("styles.xml")
-    
-    root = etree.fromstring(styles)
-    for el in root.xpath("//style:page-layout-properties", 
-        namespaces=NAMESPACES):
-        for attr in el.attrib:
+    styles = zin.open("styles.xml")
+
+    root = None
+    # some extra effort to preserve namespace prefixes
+    for event, elem in etree.iterparse(styles, events=("start", "start-ns")):
+        if event == "start-ns":
+            etree.register_namespace(elem[0], elem[1])
+        elif event == "start":
+            if root is None:
+                root = elem
+
+    styles.close()
+
+    for el in root.findall(".//style:page-layout-properties",
+            namespaces=NAMESPACES):
+        for attr in el.attrib.keys():
             if attr.startswith("{%s}" % NAMESPACES["fo"]):
                 del el.attrib[attr]
     
@@ -42,7 +60,7 @@
     
     for item in zin.infolist():
         if item.filename == "styles.xml":
-            zout.writestr(item, etree.tostring(root))
+            zout.writestr(item, etree.tostring(root, encoding="UTF-8"))
         else:
             zout.writestr(item, zin.read(item.filename))
     
@@ -54,8 +72,8 @@
 def main():
     args = sys.argv[1:]
     if len(args) != 1:
-        print >> sys.stderr, __doc__
-        print >> sys.stderr, "Usage: %s STYLE_FILE.odt\n" % sys.argv[0]
+        sys.stderr.write(__doc__)
+        sys.stderr.write("\nUsage: %s STYLE_FILE.odt\n" % sys.argv[0])
         sys.exit(1)
     filename = args[0]
     prepstyle(filename)