Before OASIS OpenDocument was proposed to the public (pushed by the European Union itself, to rid themselves of using a format that'd be tied to a specific application, free or not), the format that documents should be in wasn't really standardized. There's many that claim that Microsoft's formats are standard, while not everything about the formats are known outside of Microsoft. Then there's the pseudo-standards like Rich Text or CSV that often get the job done, but have serious limitations (and even extensions by things like Corel or Microsoft that reduce those formats interoperatability).
OpenDocument truely promises to be the cure for this. It was developed by an idependent organization (not Sun or anyone else), and the format allows for virtually every feature expected in an office suite. And the beauty of being XML is that if you are writting a program, and its missing a feature, another program will ignore that section of code and instead display what it can (hopefully not down to _just_ the bare content; but at least it'd be readable).
And on top of this, the claim/assumption that OpenOffice.org is the only program that supports it is simply not true. KOffice implemented OpenDocument far before OOo 2.0 went into the production stage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Applications_supporting_OpenDocume...
My plea for not using a Microsoft format does not call for a format that only a few applications support, even though it's open (eg, the AbiWord XML format isn't widely supported). Nor does it call for an extremely limited format like Rich Text Format. It calls for a fully-featured, well supported (and more applications to come, for sure), and open format.
On 11/10/05, David Johnson davidjohnson.johnson@gmail.com wrote:
Chuck E. Cheese, CEC entertainment Inc. only uses OOo. Just FYI
On 11/10/05, Les Cooper <leigh-cottage@tiscali.co.uk > wrote:
Michael B. Trausch wrote:
Mike Swanson wrote: [snip]
You do not need to feel strongarmed into using Impress' file format. You can save it in Impress' file format as well as exporting it to Microsoft's PowerPoint format. Just an idea.
Just because Impress supports PowerPoint documents, doesn't meant it's complete or perfect. Just like the DOC (Word) and XLS (Excel) formats, it's secret and must be reverse engineered. And similar to DOC and XLS, the non-Microsoft parsing of them changes between free software programs. Sometimes better in some documents, sometimes worse in other. Hell, sometimes it's impossible to see what the document was even intended to look like (eg, the MS Word-created flyer I was trying to see)
I understand. Perhaps I didn't say what I was meaning to: If OO.o is used to generate the document, OO.o will parse it the same way. I was saying that if the proprietary formats are "needed," then OO.o can save them -- interoperability works nearly perfectly, IME, going from OO.o to Office, however, coming back from the other direction seems to break with documents with more advanced formatting. While I'm sure they're working on it, I try to avoid them, anyway. I hate proprietary stuff, and avoid whenever possible. (And no: I'm not quite as bad as some people on the subject, such as RMS.)
I only use OO.o but my default save format is as ms office formats. Such a
small percentage of (ordinary) people use OO.o, that to produce files in its own format is pissing into the wind. However, I can tell people how the files were produced and recommend OO.o to them. The important thing at the moment is not the use of open document formats, it is persuading people to use OO.o so that the user base is broad enough for them to used!
Cheers Les _______________________________________________ Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
-- David Johnson http://www.davefilms.us _______________________________________________ Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
-- Mike