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

[Brandon Turner]

Hi,
I put a copied of the flyer and presentation in pdf and native open 
office style in r19121.  We(I) will try to keep these formats with 
updated content in the doc and ppt.

Brandon

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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