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
Hi Mike,
--- Mike Swanson mikeonthecomputer@gmail.com 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.
If the developers vote for it I have no problem abiding by that. That being said I am not going to call for a vote on it right now. I am more productive in Microsoft Office than I am in OpenOffice when it comes to presentations and I don't really want to be strong armed in to any format (open or closed). I chose Powerpoint because I KNOW every single Windows+Office system in the world can view my presentation. I am happy to make duplicates of my stuff in OpenDocument but I don't want to be forced in to it.
Thanks Steven
__________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com
Steven Edwards wrote:
If the developers vote for it I have no problem abiding by that. That being said I am not going to call for a vote on it right now. I am more productive in Microsoft Office than I am in OpenOffice when it comes to presentations and I don't really want to be strong armed in to any format (open or closed). I chose Powerpoint because I KNOW every single Windows+Office system in the world can view my presentation. I am happy to make duplicates of my stuff in OpenDocument but I don't want to be forced in to it.
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.
- Mike
Well, I'm sorry that I might feel like I'm pushing a non-MS Office supported too much, but on the other hand, MS Office files aren't supported very well by non-MS programs themselves. Unless Microsoft implements OpenDocument, I'm afraid we are stuck in a hole... unless it's still possible to write plugins for MS Office (eg, one to save/read OpenDocument). I heard that the plugin-ability of MS Office has been getting smaller as it became the dominant suite.
On 11/10/05, Michael B. Trausch fd0man@gmail.com wrote:
Steven Edwards wrote:
If the developers vote for it I have no problem abiding by that. That being said I am not going to call for a vote on it right now. I am more productive in Microsoft Office than I am in OpenOffice when it comes to presentations and I don't really want to be strong armed in to any format (open or closed). I chose Powerpoint because I KNOW every single Windows+Office system in the world can view my presentation. I am happy to make duplicates of my stuff in OpenDocument but I don't want to be forced in to it.
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) -- Mike
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.)
- Mike
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
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
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
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
Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
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
Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Subversion handles binary files just as good as text files.
-----Original Message----- From: ros-dev-bounces@reactos.org [mailto:ros-dev-bounces@reactos.org] On Behalf Of Reuben Perelman Sent: 14. november 2005 04:32 To: ReactOS Development List Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Microsoft Office files in the trunk
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
Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
"svn diff" can't handle binary files as good as text files.
Casper Hornstrup wrote:
Subversion handles binary files just as good as text files.
-----Original Message----- From: ros-dev-bounces@reactos.org [mailto:ros-dev-bounces@reactos.org] On Behalf Of Reuben Perelman Sent: 14. november 2005 04:32 To: ReactOS Development List Subject: Re: [ros-dev] Microsoft Office files in the trunk
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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Brandon Turner -
Casper Hornstrup -
David Johnson -
Les Cooper -
Michael B. Trausch -
Mike Swanson -
Reuben Perelman -
Steven Edwards