[ros-dev] Microsoft Office files in the trunk

[Mike Swanson]

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