Why OpenOffice.org? Open Document Formats

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.

Comments

Righto Mate

[fire-eyes]

Till people read this: http://www.nzoss.org.nz/portal/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=284

Sam Hiser, OpenOffice.org - interviewed at LW

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a cool interview with Sam Hiser of OpenOffice.org here

Re:file size

[figleaf]

It is a compressed zip file.
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?

[MrBandersnatch]

OMG the parent was modified up as insightful!!!

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.

Re:Formatting Woes

[LnxAddct]

Its called pdf (portable document format) and OO.o can save to it natively.
Regards,
Steve

Re:OO Templates?

[oo_waratah]

Try http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/

Open formats are good

[martin-k]

I'm all for open file formats. That's why our own TextMaker 2005 will support OpenDocument (née Oasis) and OOo file formats. Not that developing a filter was much less daunting than developing our Microsoft Word filter... ;-)

Re:Open formats are good

[martin-k]

When everything is complete, we intend to make OpenDocument one of the default formats. Right now, we are still grappling with some issues in SVG import, so we still have some work to do.

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:How to speed OpenOffice file-format adoption

[sploo22]

First of all, the format specification is freely available. Second of all, what do you mean by "third-party viewers"? Do you think PDF support should be integrated into the OS?

Re:Stability

[DeTHZiT]

Usually when you experience many random crashes, or seemingly random results from a program, there's usually a problem with your system memory (RAM).

Try using Memtest86 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.

[jbn-o]

For Peruvian Congressman Villanueva, use of free software and free formats was critical--his letter to Microsoft on why he was rejecting their arguments 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

[YrWrstNtmr]

I'm starting to do some testing on something similar with OOo (with a look to replacing MSOffice with OOo for a number of users), but the fact is, that sort of thing is relatively trivial in MSOffice (specifically Excel).

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not, and XML can contain base64 which is as dense and unreadable as binary, but good XML will do that... what's it called, oh yes, THAT WHOLE TAGGING THING.

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

[jeremyp]

Do you think PDF support should be integrated into the OS?

It already is in my operating system (Mac OSX) - well not the OS but the GUI framework.

Re:Who cares if its XML?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

That project does sound truly heinous, but there's a Perl program called the Demoronizer 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?

[dmaxwell]

Koffice is in the process of transistioning to the OOo formats. I can hardly wait. I love the framebased workflow of Koffice but have trouble if I want to use those documents outside of koffice.

Re:Stability

[Anonymous Coward]

I use OOo. I wrote my Computer Science Thesis with OOo. I launched OOo writer in February and shut it down in November (on a Gentoo Linux machine). I simply cant believe your crashing problems are related to the OOo software.

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

[tajmorton]

See this for KDE: Cuckooo:

A KDE Part which allows OpenOffice.org to be run in a Konqueror window.

Is that what you're looking for?

Re:A non binary filetype has many more perks as we

[sirReal.83.]

SXWs are zipped XML files.

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

[Trejkaz]

Whereas I do hate Office intensely, Office 2003 does support XML spreadsheet files, which are just as easily editable from scripts as OOo's, or perhaps easier since they don't use a zip file.

Re:OOo to MS Office

[Vario]

Your assumption is only true for some environments. A lot of people I know would not open any word document, either because the don't have MS Office or because they don't want any possible viruses on their system. The science community does use other things than MS Office, Banks and other security sensitive people would rather get something in .pdf than in .doc

So you would get the reply: "PDF or plaintext, please"

Office 2k3 has XML support

[Keeper]

Given that this is Slashdot, I guess I shouldn't be terribly surprised to discover that nobody has pointed out that Office 2k3 has an XML document format: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyId=FE118952-3547-420A-A412-00A2662442D9&displa ylang=en

Re:Story from the front lines

[Anonymous Coward]

The hex input can be found in "Tools" -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Colors

CPH