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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.
Why no SVG support, then?
Someone had to do it.
Here's the correct link: http://www.nzoss.org.nz/portal/modules.php?name=Ne ws&file=article&sid=284
I wish people would stop touting stability as a superiority of software products. I use OO and MS Office regularly, and both have crashed on me, or done very flaky things, such as refusing to save a file for some unknown reason. I'm a more than average user, but not some elitist who has configured my machine perfectly, and if I can't get things not to crash, then your average user isn't going to be able to either. They'll try the program, excited by it's superior crash record, it'll crash once, and then they'll get burned, blame the software and never try again. There's plenty of good reasons to use OSS software, but stability wise, it's no better, and note no worse, in my books than an MS product.
However I have tried hard to switch to OpenOffice. Even our business people have tried to use it. And the sad truth is that it just sucks. There is no way in hell that OpenOffice competes with Microsoft Office for usability. The PowerPoint clone is especially weak: in PP, common buttons like "make the font bigger" are prominently displayed, while in OO you have to hunt hard for the button in the customization menus, and even then it doesn't work right.
This is not to say that OO is not a valuable asset. Clearly a lot of people have worked hard on it. But don't kid ourselves, this beast has a long way to go yet just to compete with MS Office 97, never mind 2003.
Crispin
... almost every file I save in Open Office gets saved as a .doc/.xls rather than an OOo format (I can't even think of the file extensions of the top of my head, thats how infrequently I use them). If the file I am saving has to be sent to anyone, or opened on a machine other than my own, I have to go with Microsoft compatability, even though it annoys me intensly.
Write a Firefox Extension that enables OpenOffice documents to be viewed in the browser, or edited if OOo is present on the system? (yes, this would be a lot of work)
.Doc files and the free MS Word Viewer to distribute written documents.
Suddenly you have an alternative to the traditional recipe of using
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Not necessarily true. Reverse-engineering XML (at least, XML that is not purposely obfuscated) is orders of magnitude easier than reverse engineering binary formats, because it is a self-descriptive format. Each piece of data has a name associated with it automatically -- the name of the tag -- as well as a rough structure (clearly this 'size' is for font size, not page size, since it's within a font tag). And just as importantly, XML tells you exactly where an 'array' of items ends because it has a /tag. With a binary format, the count for the array will typically precede the array, but does not have to... in a particularly complex format the length of the array can be implied by other parameters, and you have to use multiple samples to find out how exactly it is implied where it ends, and even when you think it's figured out it probably isn't, and the files that don't fit your assumptions will crash or produce garbage when read in.
A proprietary XML file is not at all proprietary compared to a binary file. They're easy for even a novice programmer to figure out how to read.
Random and weird software I've written.
Open, well-documented formats will allow governments and businesses to access documents/info many years from now. It's unfortunate that most IT managers don't realize how closed formats will hinder them in the future.
I'm sorry, but here you are a bit mistaken. Most importantly there are 2 things which make XML special in this area:
To say the fact they're documenting the format it is more important than the fact it's in XML is true, but that doesn't make it unimportant they're using XML.
There's SVG support. It's just not particularly good.
http://graphics.openoffice.org/svg/svg.htm
However someone is working on it, and there's enough documentation out there, you can too.
"XML is nothing more than a human-readable data file format..."
I'd say that's a pretty good reason right there, especially compared to a non-human-readable one (MS).
Whether or not a file format is closed or open, isn't what's going to drive users preferences. Users generally don't care.
The place where the open oo format can rule, is by integrating its use with other open software. Things like, an Apache server that can *create* the document format based on data it holds. By writing php scripts that can output their data directly into spreadsheets that contain formulas etc. Imagine a web application that allows the user to modify the spreadsheet online, without having to download/upload the whole thing. Think collaboration. This is where MS is trying to get too.
The power lies in finding the advantage of documented file formats. But, the first step is creating and documenting them. We just don't have that *killer* app yet.
which it actually does if you're adding images
Nonsense! OpenOffice adds images as files to its zipped archive. They do not get embedded in the XML. Thus SVG, PNG, TIF, JPG, and all the other image formats are treated the same.
Do this experiment. Create an OpenOffice.org document. Embed an image in the document. Save the document. Rename the sxw file to zip. Open the zip file using your favorite method. Notice that the image is a separate file and not a part of the content.xml file.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
...
The fact that the data format is documented (and the commitment to keep it so) is what's important.
Amen. I blogged more open file formats for my wishlist just last week and I've just received abuse from the anti-XML faction ("too hard", "too fiddly", "just a fad"). OK, so I haven't exactly been polite about programmers who don't grok XML in the past, but believe me there is still a hard core of non-Microsofties out there who still want XML to die :-)
The fact that the format is XML is rather meaningless [...] For many things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal...
Yes, it could have been a number of formats (ODIF, anyone? :-) but XML was explicitly designed for (well, inherited its application to) textual information, so it's a little captious to say it's unsuitable for binary data, but the important long-term reason is not just that it's documented, it's that it's based on an international standard, so it's public, stable, and cannot be hijacked by corporate factions (they'll try).
You should care that it's XML...