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."

Comments

That other office suite

[__past__]

Let's wait how long it takes that other office suite vendor to see the light. After all, they are an OASIS member themselves...

Additional XML benefits

[neglige]

Using an XML based (and documented!) file format has additional advantages. First and foremost, the documents can be easily used by other applications, e.g. full text indexer. Generating meta data has never been easier ;)

Or use a stylesheet on the document and adopt it for, say, mobile devices (my favourite topic, I must admit). XML->HTML, XML->WML, XML->cHTML ... no problem. It's even possible to extract an abstract, collect hyperlinks from the document and present them seperately, leave out the graphics (or convert them)...

Is this possible with .doc? I'd guess so. As easy as with XML? Don't think so.

Re:Additional XML benefits

[Anonymous Coward]

problem is that the xml files are saved in a .zip archive, containing all contained contents, where a content can be the actual document, an image included in the document, a spreadsheet document or whatmore.. The xml files would be a lot bigger than a binary format, but the zipping process manages to get it down to about the same size again most of the time..

Re:Additional XML benefits

[swillden]

The xml files would be a lot bigger than a binary format, but the zipping process manages to get it down to about the same size again most of the time..

Incorrect. Go try it on a few documents. In practice, I see that OOo Writer documents (without images) are less that half the size of their Word counterparts, and OOo is not (yet) very careful about the XML it spits out, tending to save lots of style and other information that isn't even used in the document.

The zipping process makes the files a lot *smaller* than you normally get out of a binary file format. Why? Rather simple, really. In most binary file formats (e.g. Word), the formatting information is fairly compact, but the content isn't compressed in any way. Given that English text has about one bit per character of entropy and given that (hopefully!) there's much more content than formatting, there's a lot of room for compression to do its work. In the case of embedded images, it really doesn't matter what format you use, they don't compress, but the XML doesn't add a significant amount of overhead to them, either.

Re:Additional XML benefits

[Anonymous Coward]

SBC gives us our monthly phone bill [its a sizable business] in .DOC format. It typically weighs in at about 25 meg (lots of tables and overly verbose "descriptions" of the surcharges and fees). When I save the file in OOo, it saves down to just over 700k.

Electronic Publishing

[SgtChaireBourne]

Yes, let's hope this will be a new trend. The last round of open standards (e.g. TCP/IP, HTTP + HTML) brought a lot of good, especially HTML. I'm curious to see where this step will lead.

I suspect that it is also a big step closer to electronic documents with a long shelf life. This may lead towards electronic publishing where well-formed and, possibly, valid documents become the norm. Even if the structures are rudimentary, this still will help portability and retrieval.

Right now, [X]HTML and PDF are only part way there. PDF is useful for rapid dissemination, but can more or less be thought of as a compact form of paper. Most HTML document are neither well-formed nor valid and often too dependent on transient constellations of technologies. So, a format like this will let organizations choose tools suited for their specific needs and tasks.

Which openoffice format?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since OO decided to screw everyone and change formats between 1.0 and 1.1, does that mean now Koffice is also just like microsoft in abandoning people who've supported them in the past?

Re:Abiword

[akvalentine]

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.

But now the OASIS format will BE KOffice's native tounge...

"Excellent Filters"???!!!

[fm6]

People keep prattling about how great the filters are in Open Office. Come on, people, let's be a little more objective. Parroting the OO party line is not good for the open source movement.

From my experience, OO's filters are decent, perhaps a little better than Microsoft's, but hardly anything to get excited about. The last time I read a Word file in OO, it screwed up a very simple bulleted list. Face it, it's very, very hard to write a really good word processor filter, especially for a file format as messy as Microsoft's.

The OO native file format is pretty good, or at least the current version is. I have some issues with it, like throwing in every obscure XML namespace that has some silly feature that somebody likes. And there's still too much device-specific information. But I guess you can always just ignore the noise, especially since it's more neatly separated out than in previous formats.

OK, I'm cynical about attempts to challenge Word's workplace dominance. But here's a scenario/fantasy that's worth thinking about: Bush II loses the '04 election, despite his carrier landing skills. An "anti-business" Attorney-General revives the anti-trust actions against Microsoft. This time, they ignore silly outdated rememdies like splitting off the application divisions (multiple monopolies, great) and come up with something that's ahead of the curve. Like forcing Redmond to work harder at standards compliance. Hey, you say Word dominates because it's better? Prove it: have it read and write OO format! Then you can compete on features, rather than locking out the competition with format crap.