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If you're scared about the correct layout of your documents, why don't you try out some test documents first, or push your own documents through the officeshots.org round-trip test suite? And be sure to complain if something doesn't render your correct ODF document properly.

N.B. I have seen in the past that not all test engines are on-line all the time.

If you're scared about the correct layout of your documents, why don't you try out some test documents first, or push your own documents through the officeshots.org round-trip test suite? And be sure to complain if something doesn't render your correct ODF document properly.

N.B. I have seen in the past that not all test engines are on-line all the time.

To be fair: how is the cross-application support for ODF? Does it really look the same in various word processors? Honest question, not trying to troll here.

Good question. See here: ODF Plugfest: Making office tools interoperable
and here: http://officeshots.org/

What if the choice is between PDF, DOC and ODF?
ODF is meant to be editable, and there are efforts to compare how it renders in different word processors and viewers (http://officeshots.org/).
There are no current scandals around ODF in the news, but that doesn't mean there has been no progress in crafting ODF 1.2 (currently committee draft #5, maybe published still this year) and to make it work on a lot of platforms :-)

Evidence of compatibility and INcompatibility: http://www.officeshots.org. Only for ODF formatted documents, though.

1. ODF 1.2 is approaching the final stages of standardization. See http://www.officeshots.org for an overview of how well it is supported. It seems that quite a few governments understand that this is, after a transition period, much easier to maintain their documents in than some proprietary document format, where you're bound to the vendor for ages.

Nobody is using ODF for any non-trivial interoperablilty, its just freetard code for "we use OpenOffice".

Sorry, but I believe that's just wrong. Google for "ODF plugfest". I quote:

The previous plugfest in The Hague was visited by over sixtyfive participants from forty different companies, open source projects and governments.

doesn't sound like "OpenOffice only" to me.
Or test your document out at http://officeshots.org/; I spot 12 Linux/BSD word processor programs there and 8 MS Windows word processors. 5 of which are OpenOffice/StarOffice on the different platforms.

ODF inter-compatibility has long been a problem.

That's sad.
I'd have hoped that initiatives such as ODF workshop in the Netherlands and OfficeShots.org would contribute to better interoperability.
Can you give us any idea whether things are at least improving lately.

See http://officeshots.org/