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KOffice To Use Open Office File Format
InodoroPereyra writes "This article at
The Dot indicates that the KOffice
developers decided to switch to the Open Office file format (OASIS) for their next major release. Excellent news both for KOffice, which will benefit from OpenOffice's excellent filters, and for the GNU/Linux Desktop users in general, who will benefit from a unified file format standard between these office suites."
I have been playing around with the new xml format in word 2003 beta. It works very nice. We make reports from out system to word xml. We can open it in word, we can transform it further to pdf, crystal and so on. The format is ok and not f*cked up cdat stuff.....
They will be using the OASIS file format, this doesn't mean they will be using the OOo MS import/export codebase. There MAY be a common library in the future, but that is not clear yet. Also, this is not for the coming release, but for the one after that (v2.0?) that is slated for say middle of next year.
There's one benefit you ignored. If, in future versions, they want to put additional information (i.e. new tags or attributes) the older software versions will be able to read the new documents, keeping backwards compatibility. This is the most important feature for organizations that work with standardized software, they're able to keep using old verified versions of the applications .
Disclaimer: If I disagree with you I'm probably trolling...
Actually, we do have fairly decent support for the OpenOffice file format. It's just not the default file format, nor is it likely to be. If you're interested, please read:
0 03 /Apr/0167.html/ abiword-dev/2003 /Apr/0183.html
...) or individual users to change Abi's default file format to RTF or OOo to meet their needs. It's a matter of changing 1 line of code, or altering 1 line in a configuration file. It's intentionally easy.
http://abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/2
http://abisource.com/mailinglists
Basically, while it makes sense for us to support the OOo file formats as best as possible, it is not desirable for us to make them the default file formats. If anything, RTF is a much better choice for this particular job, as I don't believe MS will be supporting the OOo file format anytime this century. However, both support RTF, and RTF is capable of preserving ~100% of the content and data that DOC is, albeit oftentimes more verbosely.
That said, it might make sense for upstream packagers (RedHat, Ximian,
This all boils down to different worldviews - Abi and OO won't ever have a 1:1 mapping of features, nor will we agree on how to represent those features in any single file format. The best you can hope for is "really close" conversions. Loss of content or presentation markup is unacceptable in a "native" file format.
IMO, the best solution is to all have a "common tongue", which may well be the OOo format, or say RTF. We should all use the common language when we want to speak to each other, and hope nothing gets lost or misinterpreted on either side during the translation (remember a translation from Abi -> KOffice using the OOo format as an "intermediary" has at least 2 points of failure instead of just 1). Unfortunately, that's all unavoidable. But when we're speaking "at home," we really want to speak our mother tongue. There's less ambiguity and a higher level of precision.
For those reasons, I don't think that the KOffice folks are necessarily making the best decision here, though I continue to wish them the best of luck and success.
Best regards,
Dom Lachowicz, AbiWord maintainer