Re: [ros-dev] Microsoft Office files in the trunk

[Reuben Perelman]

Why use a binary format? Shouldn't you be using ascii formats in a 
subversion repository.

Mike Swanson wrote:

>  In the branch of press-media, there are two documents
> currently. An MS
> Word and MS PowerPoint document.
>
> I'm calling for SVN committers for _no more_ MS Office documents. They
> are a proprietary format, of which not all the features are currently
> known. I recommend instead the use of OASIS OpenDocument. Not only
> does it save much space, but it also does not contain any secrets in
> which need to be reverse engineered to discover.
>
> Real life example:
> I opened the MS Word flyer into AbiWord, and saw strange boxes. I
> wondered what they could be, so I loaded very-large OpenOffice.org.
> They are images! Not only that, but the formatting was drastically
> different in OOo compared to AbiWord. However, in OOo, it did look a
> lot more jumbled than the image-less AbiWord interpretation. Without a
> copy of Microsoft Office, I am unable to determine how the documents
> really should look.
> I am able to open the PowerPoint file in OpenOffice.org too, but as
> it's the only presentation software I have, I can't tell to see if
> there's any other interpretation differences between free presentation
> programs (assuming they support PPT . . . )
>
> OpenDocument isn't just some crazy format that a couple of programs
> support, either. Two complete office suits which support it are
> OpenOffice.org and KOffice. Two examples of individual applications
> supporting it are AbiWord and Gnumeric. By far, these are not the only
> programs which support it, the number is in the dozens. It's an
> XML-based format (easy to implement), compressed with Info-ZIP's
> DEFLATE.
> Really, Microsoft is the only developer that refuses to use this open
> file format. They claim that "it doesn't support all the features of
> Office", but even that shouldn't stop them (weather it's true or not),
> after all, they use _far_ more limiting formats like plain text or
> CSV.
>
> Please, for the good of the project, use the free OpenDocument format.
> If not for the reason of being open or free, but simply for the fact
> that it ensures that everybody will be able to view such documents (no
> need to buy any pricey office suites here!).
> --
> Mike
>
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