Why OpenOffice.org? Open Document Formats 478
Jem Berkes writes "In this current article about OpenOffice.org (also covered at Linux Today), I try to make a point about OpenOffice's commitment to open document formats and interchange as the strongest selling point - never mind cost. The OOo developers are putting a lot of effort into their XML format; will this pay off, and will users notice the significance of OpenDocument/OASIS document formats?" This can't be said enough: file formats are what determine whether and how easily data is portable, or whether the user is just stuck.
Righto Mate (Score:2, Informative)
Sam Hiser, OpenOffice.org - interviewed at LW (Score:4, Informative)
Re:file size (Score:5, Informative)
Rename it to zip and extract the files.
The extracted files are usually larger or about the size of Word documents.
Re:Who cares if its XML? (Score:5, Informative)
The point of XML isnt that its human readable. Its that its machine PARSIBLE and that one can use a rather large number of tools in order to process the CONTENT without having to deal with all the proprietary ***** that is normally in there.
Being able to apply XSL alone on a document means it incredibly simplifys the process of converting from one format to another WITHOUT having to learn YA proprietary format/tools.
And to give you an idea of the value of this - Ive just spent 3 weeks converting a LARGE word document to XHTML (properly, i.e. its accessible, well formed etc etc). If this document had been written in OO (or if it had been possible to import it into OO without OO having convulsions on many of the tables), Id easily have shaved a week off that work.
Open formats still have long way to go (Score:-1, Informative)
My cryptology professor was not amused.
Re:Formatting Woes (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
Steve
Re:OO Templates? (Score:3, Informative)
Open formats are good (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Stability (Score:4, Informative)
Try using Memtest86 [memtest86.com] to diagnose your system. It may be nothing, bad luck, or some other component of your system misbehaving, but it's usually bad memory.
Important for government work as well. (Score:5, Informative)
For Peruvian Congressman Villanueva, use of free software and free formats was critical--his letter to Microsoft on why he was rejecting their arguments [theregister.co.uk] explains how important not being locked in is to doing transparent government work in addition to treating citizens well. I'm sure he's not the only one, but his letter to Microsoft is well worth reading.
Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats (Score:3, Informative)
Read from CSV files, Oracle tables (residing on a Linux server), and SQLServer tables, combine into one or more graphs, lists, and charts, user modify if wanted, and one button click output to Powerpoint slides and/or HTML and/or PDF.
Interoperation like this has been a central part of MSOffice for quite a while. A Word MailMerge template can spit out a bunch of 'season's greetings' in no time.
Re:Who cares if its XML? (Score:1, Informative)
Most XML uses tags, and being XML means you've got a while lot of tools like XSL-FO, Xpath, XSLT, Schemas/RelaxNG, XML Pipelines.
I code publishing cycles for a living (mostly in Apache Cocoon) and the OO.org format, although not as good as something like Docbook or TEI, is so much better than a binary format.
Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption (Score:3, Informative)
It already is in my operating system (Mac OSX) - well not the OS but the GUI framework.
Re:Who cares if its XML? (Score:2, Informative)
That project does sound truly heinous, but there's a Perl program called the Demoronizer [fourmilab.ch] which can help with those MS-Office -> HTML conversions. Even though it wouldn't help with the formatting issues, it's still a good starting point..
Re:Format is open, but is it used? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Stability (Score:1, Informative)
Additionally, the formulae functions in OOo are far superior to that of MSO. The ability to export directly to PDF (natively from OOo) as opposed to installing inferior pdf converter plugins in MSO is another reason why OOo is superior.
Finally, Endnote for MSO is about the most unreliable, crash prone program I have ever seen. Again OOo does this natively with their built in Bibliography Database.
Re:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A non binary filetype has many more perks as we (Score:3, Informative)
zdiff (1) - compare compressed files
If that won't work out-of-the-box, it could be made to easily.
Re:Data Interchange with Open File Formats (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OOo to MS Office (Score:2, Informative)
So you would get the reply: "PDF or plaintext, please"
Office 2k3 has XML support (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Open formats are good (Score:3, Informative)
The problem was with OOo file format documentation. It's huge but neither complete nor correct. The Oasis documentation was much better. We were backporting information from the Oasis docs to our OpenOffice filters.
Re:Story from the front lines (Score:1, Informative)
CPH