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

Why not just .pdf?

[g0hare]

Output everything to .pdf, then you can edit that if you need in your original app, whatever that is. Who wants other people mucking about with your files anyway?

Parent a troll.

[oliverthered]

I think your confused.

'The fact that the format is XML (a standard agreed by the world as a format to interchange data in, with thousands of supporting tools, and huge amouts of money and time poored into it's development) is rather meaningless.... (for someone who does a grep /var/spool/mail/mymail -r 'mum' instead of /sender[@name='mum'])

XML is nothing more than a human-readable data file format....(a standard agreed by the world as a format to interchange data in, with thousands of supporting tools, and huge amouts of money and time poored into it's development)..
For many things XML is unsuitable/non-optimal (i.e. databases,binary data,etc...).

If I want to convert my mysql database into a train ticket on the web then the database is also in a non-optimal format, you see there's no suck thing as an optimal format.

If you want to store bianary data, fine. you could use a cdata tag, and have the host convert the cdata into a more optimal binary format.

You could also get the host to index XML very easly so that queries can be performed at the same speed as with a typical dataabase.

small but slow

[rice_burners_suck]

I can tell you that I've noticed two things about OOo's document format.

First of all, when I opened a large Microsoft Word document and then saved it into OOo format, the resulting file was roughly two-thirds the size of the original. Thus, OOo files take up less space. This might not seem quite so important in the modern age of hard drives bigger than Just Johnnie's brain implant, but it can make the difference between a file fitting on a floppy disk and being just too damn big.

The other thing I noticed is that OOo takes a long time to save documents. I haven't looked at the source code, but I assume that when the document is in memory, it is in some format, and that format is converted to XML upon being saved. Either this encoding process takes a long time because of the inherent differences between the in-memory format and the on-disk format, or it is a theoretically efficient process with a slow implementation.

So, yeah... OOo documents are small to store and slow to save.