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Open Document Format Approved
An anonymous reader writes "The OASIS Group announces that the third Committee Draft [PDF] of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 Specification has been approved
as an OASIS Standard. The submission of the approved standard can be found at here.
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office. Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."
*Acrobat reader required
- posted in hardware?
I doubt M$ will ever support this format, or else their main revenue stream would be endangered.
Any word from the other OpenSource/Free Software office suites if they're planning on supporting (if not totally moving) to the new formats?
What are the criteria for approving standards by the OASIS group? Is there any guarantee on the quality of the standard itself?
God knows why, but they are listed.
Only if you chisel it in stone...
Timo's Audio Software http://www.esseraudio.com
The question still remains:
- Will Open Office, AbiWord, et al adopt this?
- Will Microsoft adopt this?
- Will adoption mean Default, Available Option, or partial support (import only)
It's a step in the right direction, no doubt, but how will this be addressed in practice?Is the any indication if their proposed format is entirely free of patent issues? Given the office format patents that MS has applied for recently, that could be an issue.
see a Text Widget
It's all very well having an open document system, but let's look at this in detail:
For this system to work, every office app needs to adopt this file format. That way, companies can theoretically switch between vendors. Why would Microsoft, who already have the lion's share of the office market include this format? That would surely be shooting themselves in the feet.
If there were, say, three competing office suites each with 33% of the market share, then you could understand them wanting to include support for this format - companies would demand that the app supported them or switch to an alternative. However, when one office suite controls anything in the region of up to 96% of the market share, it'll take a lot more than a common open file format to persuade the average business to move away from a program that is pretty much the standard, whether we like it or not.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
PDF is an open format. Here's the link, if you'd like to implement a reader: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html
Activists United
So why is this in the hardware category? Am I missing something? Or is it because you can print out documents thus turning them into hardware?
Which they, most obviously, won't.
However, I applaud this group for at least trying. However the realistic cynic in me says that we're not going to see many gains. Hell, the average user in a company doesn't know of and has never been exposed to anything else but Word, Powerpoint and Excel.
If that's the sort of minimal marketshare the competition occupies, it's going to be a tough battle.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
They can just keep .doc as the default option for saving files. Most users never change the defaults, that's why I still get forwarded messages as attatchmets from outlook users.
Office suites aren't the only players in this market.
Since this format is Open, there are no limitations to integrating it into other products such as CMS system, reports (which is more common than you'd expect) and all sorts of other tools which a business uses.
If this integration reaches a certain critical mass where it becomes too much of an advantage for businesses to ignore, MS will have no choice but to adopt it.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It's amazing to see so many people already giving up before the fight has even started.
Yes, everyone is aware of the stranglehold MS has on the market, but this new standard is exactly meant to fight this stranglehold. And I don't agree that MS has to come on board to make this a success.
1. This gives all alternatives to MS Office an advantage over MS Office, which is of course a good thing.
2. Now that it is a standard, what about governments requiring that the software they use be standard compatible?
3. Even if MS themselves don't support it, how about third party verndors, or open source hackers developing a plugin for MS Office to support this format?
To sum it up, I think it is a little more complex than you seem to think and the fight has only just started, so don't give up yet.
CONSUMER: We demand this new open file format - it allows us more choice and prevents us from being locked down to one Word Processor exclusively.
OPENOFFICE: Okay, we've included it. Now you can read and write to this new open format!
MICROSOFT: We've just added support for the new format too. You can read all open format Word Processor documents in Word. We didn't include a function to write to an open document - our users don't want that kind of complication.
OPENOFFICE: Let's sit back and wait for this open file format to kick start the OpenOffice adoption!
CONSUMER: Microsoft just offered us Office free for 5 years when they found out we were considering an open source alternative to our operating system. Word can even read all these open format files we have created in OpenOffice - let the migration begin!
OPENOFFICE: Oh dear.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
No. But if it had come as a
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Does this mean I can convert from wordML to openoffice and back with a simple XSLT?
This could make for a pretty neat web based document repository which returns documents in any format I like.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
Everybody (/. readers not included) uses MS Office. Why? Because it is a 'standard'. OK, its a lousy standard. In fact, its more of a moving target than a standard, but the trick is that nobody knows this.
Sure they know that sometimes when they put their file on a floppy disk and put that in the post to send to their collegue half way across the office that sometimes it looks a bit different to how it looked on their computer, but then thats how computers are!?!
People don't know what word processor is unless its Word. They are taught it in school. They are taught in college and they are taught it in night classes. Its what employers want to see on CVs. People freek when they see PDFs. People freak when they see RTFs! Why? Because on windows they don't have a blue 'W' on them that lets them know its a word processing docuement.
The .doc is here for the long haul. It has survived every attempt by microsoft to improve it. It has survived some glaring security holes and it will continue to do this because consumers are not offered an alternative that they understand and that remains word compatible.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
It won't do any good at all. It will be like esperanto; what's the point of creating an open document format if you won't be able to communicate with anyone with it? Because unfortunately, if you can't communicate with the stock install of Microsoft Word, you basically can't communicate with anyone.
.docs for the same reason we use .doc to transfer files now: For the benefit of people too lazy or dumb to open files in anything but Microsoft Word.
.doc?" And these were mostly tech jobs I was applying for. It was kind of scary. Now I have a copy of Microsoft Word which I own seemingly solely so that I can create my resume in it, and my resume is sent out as .doc, always.
Okay, yeah, I'm sure there's probably some tiny niche somewhere this fills. But the rest of us are going to have to ignore this new thingy and just continue shipping around
There was a period some years ago, when I first started looking for work, that I didn't have a copy of Microsoft Word, so I would send out my resume as an HTML file, or a PDF, or if it seemed appropriate both. Over this period, most of the time when I sent my resume out, the response-- even when the sent file was just an HTML file, that you double click and it opens in MSIE-- was "I can't figure out how to open your resume, do you have a
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
This of course depends on whether the standard gains some credibility. Perhaps IBM could have a stab at Microsoft by declaring their wholehearded support for the standard.
CUSTOMER: Our copies of Microsoft Office don't work on any new PCs. Help!
MICROSOFT: Tough. Shell out $500 per PC per month, or lose the ability to read your documents.
CUSTOMER: Somebody help us!!!
OPENOFFICE (silence - died years ago due to lack of interest)
Can someone explain to me what differance this new format has over .doc when OO.org can open .doc files and convert most other formats into .doc files
Thanks
All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest
I've just spent the last 15 minutes swearing over a damn OpenOffice .sxw file, get them to resend it in .rtf format after being harangued for using MS Office, sit down for a coffee, fire up /. for a reads and I get this...
*?
Yes, they will Embrace And Extend(tm) it.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
What's the difference between this new format and the one the OpenOffice.Org uses? Isn't it open? Or these two the same, and I'm just not comprehending?
MS's 'Software Assurance' bulk licensing scheme is set up in such a way that you end up effectively having to re-buy all your MS-software every few years anyway. So, long-term, you have a choice of paying a fortune to Microsoft at regular intervals just to maintain your current level of licensing, or pay a smaller fortune once only in order to migrate away. The more open formats like this exist, the less painful and hence more attractive moving away becomes. Roll on the day of the tipping point!
Most people are approaching this from the wrong PoV.
Once there is a standard in place, then implementation occurs. And it's definitely likely to appear - first in Open Office, then maybe spreading - I can see Linux using it as the default document standard.
Microsoft will eventually have to support it - if it reaches 10% of the market, then you are going to start getting complaints from customers. Even if it only implements a read-only function, that's good enough.
I face a major productivity sapper, when I send off a .sxw to someone who can't open it. I have to open, export to .doc, check that it displays ok, and then resend. If I can happily compose in whatever editor I want, and press send without having to bother about whether a client will be able to read or not - so much the better.
As an aside, the Indian government is slowly adopting Open Office - mainly because these can be easily translated into the local language. Useful, especially in rural areas and the smaller towns. The government itself released a Tamil version of Open Office, Firefox and a bunch of other stuff. Check out their efforts here.
Cheers, R.
Now will it be pushed though ISO (prefereably/ SmartEC
though a fasttrack). The ISO stamp carries far
more weight for governements agencies and this
could cange a lot of things. See for example
Tim Bray's log on the subject
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/09/24
Daniel
BTW: wasn't the September 2004 LSB spec supposed to be fasttracked though the ISO process too ?
I'm in the process of looking for work now, and I've found that recruitment agents in particular tend to prefer Word documents over something like PDF or HTML.
This isn't because they can't open the latter -- it's because they like to be able to easily edit them. When a recruitment agent hands your resume to a potential employer, they'll usually want to remove identifying information from your resume. This, of course, prevents the employer from approching you directly, in which case the recruitment agent might not get their commission.
Granted that this isn't quite the same as not being able to open a resume at all, but recruitment agents in particular do often have an ulterior motive for wanting a Word document rather than a PDF, for instance.
Back when I was a developer I wrote all my documentation in TeX. I often get emails requesting a Word version of my documentation. Even though TeX is quite open.
Underholdning.info
MS Word does support plugins to read/write obscure file formats -you can install some from the Office CD which aren't installed by default
.doc just for Govt employees, as was previously achieved)
So it should be possible to add that functionality. However - I believe that if Govt buyers specify OASIS compatibility as a requirement then MS will be obliged to provide it eventually (much better than requiring relicensing of
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
A short googling doesn't give many results with abiword related to oasis.
r /2005/Feb/0002.html
It seems not even in February 2005 to have been worth a discussion:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-use
Recently a US govt department got a licencing concession from MS re use of .DOC format in non-ms software. Not a big step but it proved that MS will change the rules when threatened with competing OS products.
If a govt dept put out a requirement for software that can read and write both MS and OASIS formats natively, do you think they wouldnt tender for the contract?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
"And these were mostly tech jobs I was applying for. It was kind of scary. Now I have a copy of Microsoft Word which I own seemingly solely so that I can create my resume in it, and my resume is sent out as .doc, always."
Will create a doc file just fine and I didn't have to pay monopolistic prices for it. Kind of scary that you didn't realize that before spending your money.
There is a mis-perception that it is not an open format by people who only know microsoft office, because the most reliable method of converting MS office documents to .pdf is by printing to acrobat distiller, for which you need to buy about $300 worth of Adobe software.
Open office exports to .pdf from the file menu. This functionality cost $0 to include, because the format is open. If Microsoft had a business model that involved providing useful tools to their customers they could have included the same functionality, with the same $0 in licensing costs to them.
However since it is more important to them that they have as large a proportion of the world as possible locked into their own proprietary formats, so you find that despite charging you $600-$900 dollars simple, cheap, useful functionality is not included.
And the consequence? People think that .pdf is a proprietary format! You should realize by now that Microsoft's (illegal) business model is doing a great disservice to their customers and the world.
They are not selling a product that is good for their customers. They are selling a product that instead ensures that they will not have to sell a product that is good for their customers in the future.
Still want to buy their stuff?
I suspect that one of the (admittedly several) reasons that Word managed to knock out Wordperfect so many years ago was that Wordperfect didn't make a huge effort to be compatible with the competition. WordPerfect Corporation took its users for granted, and it was very slow off the blocks in a lot of ways.
Microsoft went to a lot of effort to make Word as compatible as possible with Wordperfect files, just as OpenOffice and several others are doing now, but Wordperfect Corporation didn't go to as much effort in returning the favour for Microsoft Word. My understanding is that it was more like 95% compatibility for a long time. The end result was that Word could cleanly deal with two formats, but Wordperfect could only reliably deal with its own.
The consequence? Once Word documents had reached a critical mass due to certain "other" reasons, people tended to go for the application that would allow them to easily deal with both types of documents rather than only Wordperfect files. This, of course, turned out to be Microsoft Word, and adoption of it was accelerated.
OpenDocument may not be quite the same situation, because with the OpenDocument format being... well... open, it wouldn't necessarily be too difficult for Microsoft to add support if everyone suddenly decided that they wanted it. This would be a victory in itself for other office applications, though, because it would immediately give Word-using businesses and governments the opportunity of distributing files that more people than just Word users can reliably access.
If there's a critical mass of non-Word users (which could even be a combination of Openoffice, Koffice, and whatever else), it's enough reason for many organisations to seriously consider what their standard document formats should be.
I will believe it when corporations decide to adopt this new open format. Years of PDF and .doc don't go away just becomes someone comes along with an Open Format.
I like it...I just don't think it will even be noticed by the major corporations of the world.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Yeah I do, actually. Word is great. PDF is crap bloatware whether its open or not.
Surely hope they do..
Bits of News Giving you the latest bits.
"Organizations and individuals that store their data in an open format avoid being locked in to a single software vendor, leaving them free to switch software if their current vendor goes out of business or changes their software or licensing terms to something less favorable."
This is only if M$ decides to implement it as the default (something I highly doubt they will do). All the Microsoft Office ludites will still save in the default format M$ specifies. No matter how sad it is, consider this the standard that never was...
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Does that format allow embedded documents?
.doc format document embedded ...
If so, Microsoft might just produce "conforming" files which have a single
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This is great news.
The foss office apps have each had their own format. Now there is a chance that there will be just one ( or at least, one dominant one ).
This improves the chances of eroding the MS hold on office docs.
For people who think about such things they will have the choice of saving in ms and having it useful in one place or saving it in the new open format and having their docs be able to go many places.
With only one std os format ms might even implement it out of pressure, be it government, criticism, or simply trying to kill foss open apps.
This is good news.
Hey, just let .doc be the official extension of the new open format!
Think about it!
A microsoft troll that doesn't read like a marketing peice. You restore something of my faith in trolling.
Word is great if you're embedding other microsoft objects in it. Otherwise open office is just as good. And the open office programming language is much better than VB for word.
If you're using a word processor for school, you'll get better marks with wordperfect, because the grammar checker is much better than word's.
But up to you what you use.
And you know how that happens?
The US Department of Defense. If there is any "customer" that can tell Microsoft what's what, it's the DoD. (Other branches of the government can too; they have the juice but they don't have the prunes.) Once the DoD even begins to addopt these open formats, it immediately shuts out Microsoft because Office doesn't support them.
Microsoft would have to make a very painful decision at that point.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
At least here in the EU, governments are finally starting realize that it's bad when all their data is locked up in a proprietary format. So you see it more and more that supporting Open Standards is is a requirement when they are evaluating software.
This means that either Microsoft needs to implement Open Standards, or they aren't even considered anymore. Maybe it's not that black and white as I write here, but at least there is real pressure to implement Open Standards.
It will take time, but as soon as open and better standards for graphics were introduced, BMP and GIF were on the way out.
Why would you want to tags to html for printing purposes? I believe CSS2 or 3 will be able to do this. And then there is a much better solution: xml + xslt. You take one document with the data (xml) and use the xslt to convert it to any format you want: pdf (xsl-fo), wordml, html, odf, rtf, etc. What you suggest is something you don't want to happen.
Specification of which is at http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html
hmm... what do we have here? An official Office file format specificiation. Interesting... this is far better than Microsoft Office
I'll just go ahead and quietly print this off and send it on over to the patent office.
*later*
You're Honor... I have indisputable evidence that the OSS community is in direct voilation of MY copywrite and I demand no less than a billion dollars.
*later - Bill swimming in his money*
Another day... another OSS project patanted and sued.
Nowadays I just store information in Wiki's. A directory tree with documents is an outdated structure for storing (shared) knowledge. Because of Wiki's associative nature you can create multiple views of your information, and you can collaborate to very high degree.
BTW: The only formatting that is really relevant are headers, bullets, and simple tables.
We should all lobby our federal state and local governments for adoption of this standard. Once that starts to happen, it is certain to have support added by all of the vendors.
So why haven't anyone done it?
OO.org already have word->OASIS and OASIS->word filter. You would think it would be easy (compared to making OpenOffice) to develop MSOffice plugins that could read and write OASIS documents.
You would even think there would be custumers willing to pay for that. If someone, eg. the city of Munich, switch to OASIS they could put OASIS documents on webpages and in email (where HTML and cleartext is not approriate) along with a link to these plugins.
No, Acrobat Reader is. Apple Preview works great as do the readers I've used on linux and I'm sure there are better readers available on windows too.
Having a vendor neutral open format will make it easier to get government agencies to put it down as a requirement. Government agencies loves that sort of thing.
It is likely that Microsoft will even implement some kind of half-hearted and useless support for this format, just enough to make MS Office meet the formal requirements for compliance, but not enough to be useful (as they did with the Posix subsystem in NT).
I've always wondered why we don't have similar collaboration tools for developing documentation, as we do for developing code. Often when creating design documentation with several other coworkers, we end up using Word and it's a complete nightmare to merge changes. I'd almost prefer DocBook XML and CVS. Anyone aware of a documentation tool that solves this issue?
Can anyone explain, how a format can be compatible in the future? I mean, does there come new features all the time?
I wonder what the extension is. odf ?
Why is this? Because I swap documents with my co-workers, my suppliers, and my customers. If a customer wants a copy of my slides, I HAVE to give him .ppt. There is no way I can start any
sort of discussion with him about doc formats,
it is a distraction to my primary business.
Editable office document formats are not just an organisation-internal thing. That's why they are so sticky.
I am far more afraid of a new document format than of a new word processor. If I try a new word processor and don't like it, I can go back. But if I embrace a new document format, and want to change back in 2 years' time, I'm stuck. FireFox spread quickly because trying it is low-risk. The same is not true of OO.
Why can't OO embrace and extend the .doc format,
rather than inventing something new?
/quickly dons flame-proof underpants
I don't understand how 95% of documents out there are in the .doc format, 5% are others, yet these supporters of the others are coming up with "standards". Since when does an incredible minority decide what is to become a standard? I am going to come up with some standards of my own and expect all the larger consortiums to respect it... how far do you think that will go?
They know that obscurity is only a temporary measure. Look at how good OO is at opening doc files -- not perfect, but good enough for most files and most people.
You can get a sense for what would be a reasonable strategy by considering this: there already is a widely implemented, open file format for word processing: RTF. But it doesn't support stylesheets, among other things.
So, the way to make sure an open format doesn't catch on is to put a bunch of features in your word procesor, which have to be supported by the file format, that aren't in the open specification. Saving and reloading that format is going to feel a bit unnatural, since information natural to the operation of Word will be missing. The file format will be perceived as crippled.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What does this mean for open source? If this standard is taken seriously by cash cows ie. governments and mega corps. How will open source position itself to take advantage? I've used OOo but didn't really get it. I could see no advantage, as a MS Office licence holder, to switch, if anything it reaffirmed my choice to buy M$ (shudder). The same wasn't true of Apple's Pages. It made me instantly more productive for certain tasks and means that for the majority of my Word Processing needs I've dropped word entirely. I guess my point is that some of you guys (and both the girls) (I'll help if you'll let me) need to get together and make a better office suite. It has be easier to use, faster to load, pretty and free. It doesn't have to be portable as long as it can read and write the standard docs. In fact, it would probably be better if it wasn't, in my humble experience user interfaces to not translate because of the subtle differences in metaphores between platforms. It could even be, shock horror, a web app! (Google, if you're reading this please contact me for details of where to send the cheque :) ).
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
After all these years of experience with word processors that change brands, change versions, documents that look different after computers upgrade or if your friend looks at them on a different computer, and paying good money for these word processors
why don't governments and large companies insist that any word processor purchased and used in their organization be able to automatically write a standard, free, open format like this?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Yes! Because this will totally be used by Office! I'm sure Microsoft will give up on their proprietary formats to embrace open technology, or at least make it way easy to interoperate with these formats!
Oh, wait, that goes against the strategies of Microsoft and thus the overwhelming majority of the office software market.
So, in the best case, we have standardization for the two percent of the office market not using MS Office. Be still my beating heart.
This isn't like OpenEXR, where there was a real reason to have an open format---there was real competition between proprietary vendors, and it made things difficult. There isn't any real competition in the office arena, just vendor lock-in.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
One of the things to consider is that there are a number of corporations and government agencies who are sponsoring the OASIS open format. They may be able to force MS to make their products OASIS compatible. MS will still have a significant advantage due to the vast user base already trained in MS Office.
I was wondering why no one mentioned the extremely versatile open document format already available to everyone and even used 300 katrillion times a day, HTML.
Then you mentioned it! I was like, cool, finally I found a post to use my last mod point on. Then you finish with how you bought Word to conform to common stupidity. I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. No one is too stupid to open an HTML document, as it opens in a browser automatically. The browser is what people have more experience than any other application, c'mon, my mom can use a browser!
HTML - the only open doc format 99.99% of us need - embrace it.
Unless you know what's going on in serious documentation, you don't understand what this is about. Serious documentation (books, manuals, etc.) has been moving away from Microsoft Word for a decade now, but it has had a lot of bumps along the way. Any reasonable-sized company with a documentation library is going to be using something like FrameMaker, Xmetal, RoboHelp, AuthorIt or any other number of real publishing packages.
One problem with this is that each software package is good for a particular type of publishing (print, PDF, online help, HTML) and not as good or useless for the others. The other problem is that the collaboration models on most of these programs are weak.
But the really big issue is that the companies making these products tend either to get bought out by the big guys or go belly-up after a few years when the new tool-de-jour hits the shelves. In the last few weeks, two tools (RoboHelp and FrameMaker) announced end-of-life. Now if you are HP and you are using one of these, you are now stuck with thousands of pages of documentation in a semi-proprietary format. This happens to you every few years, and you pop several thousand or several hundred thousand dollars in the conversion each time.
It just so happens that the tool-du-jour right now is something called AuthorIT, which isn't even a cousin of a word processor. It's a database that stores documents, and stores output properties. It actually is the one tool that does a good job of producing print and online documentation (CHM, HTML, XML, whatever) The single-sourcing capablity is why it is the tool-du-jour, and why a lot of the big companies use it. CA alone has a million pages in this format.
But AuthorIt isn't any bigger than those previous tool companies, and their format is just as proprietary, although you can have HTML and XML output, so in theory you are in pretty good shape for converting. Still, these big companies are using it for their big documentation projects.
I don't know what percentage of documentation uses all these other tools, but suffice it to say it's a lot, and it's more critical stuff than most of what is written in Word. These people don't care about the documents written in Word. They are all on the standards body so that they don't have to keep losing all their documentation styles, templates and layouts every time a new kind of online help or new kind of documentation product becomes popular.
The idea of a standard (according to the Open Standards entry at Wikipedia.org) is a communal agreement with the intent to facilitate reaching a goal. There are proprietary standards, and plain ol' standards as well. The word standard has many meanings. Yes, English is tricky, but I'm sure if you try again, you'll get it.
.doc format (except for that whole non-backwards compatibility that happened years ago).
I also think people should get off Microsoft's case a *wee* bit about their closed formats. They just don't want other people telling them what features to implement, and they want full control. And they want all the money. There are other aspects of Microsoft to hate much more than the
Please stop stalking me, bro.
So if a document isn't .doc, many users have no clue what to do with it, even if their program does support it. I've seen MS Word users stare dumbfounded at a MS Works file that their program handles natively. Either this format needs to use .doc (which will cause the compatibility nightmare of the early 90's where most word proccessors used .doc, and none were compatible with each other) or Microsoft has to open up their .doc format so everyone can implement that
Free MacMini
I suspect that one of the (admittedly several) reasons that Word managed to knock out Wordperfect so many years ago was that Wordperfect didn't make a huge effort to be compatible with the competition.
Completely off topic: A reasonable suspicion, but that's not what happened:
WordPerfect prided itself on converting everything, even arcane formats (for example, on WP 2000, I can save in MultiMate and Navy DIF Standard formats, whatever that is). I recall no unusual problems with Word (no conversion is perfect).
Nor was WordPerfect technically inferior. In one PC Magazine review at the time, even 16 bit WordPerfect beat 32 bit Word.
Word's advantages were,
1) They came out with a 16 bit Windows 3.1 version first.
2) They came out with a 32 bit Windows version way ahead of the competition. There were complaints that they took advantage of inside info on Win95.
3) Word was bundled with Excel -- that was the beginning of 'office suites'.
4) Microsoft, already holding the Windows monopoly, licensed Office to PC manufacturers in the following way: The manufacturer buys one Office license fee for every machine they sell, whether or not the customer buys Office. Guess what came with every new PC?
The gov't eventually made MS change the last strategy on anti-trust grounds.
Not really. Standards have to be essentially unchanging, that's why they're standard. Having people able to make their own version of pdf wouldn't help anyone. Having everyone able to make their own reader for the official pdf does.
I am trolling
What caught my attention was the abbreviation SOA.
a _committee/
This abbreviation is quite often mentioned on TV and Radio. According to the Dutch dictionary, the abbreviation is for "Sexueel Overdraagbare Aandoening", which translates to "Sexual transferable disease" (like herpes and AIDS).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/04/_oasis_so
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
... eventualy, but is it good? Have you seen how well MS has adopted the W3 open standards for css and (x)html? If saving your document in this open format results in strange things, people will blame the format and not MS.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Sure, I realize there are still people in the dark ages that feel the need to smear ink all over paper and pay some dude 2 bits to walk the paper to its destination in a few days time.
Most of the time, I dare say all the time but most of the time is good enough, people smearing ink on paper would be better served with HTML and digital transmission. Look at the benefits:
It's free! No ink to buy!
It's free! No paper to buy!
It's free! No mailman to pay!
It's free! No expensive application to buy!
It's free! Save your money for beer. (I really don't even like beer. I mention it only because I feel it will motivate slashdotters to adopt this open standard when they think about all the more beer they can purchase.)
HTML - you ARE ready.
(The Mozilla people should incorporate a basic HTML WYSIWYG editor with Mozilla to aid in the adoption of the standard they so adamantly support.)
Whatever just make it so when I send .DOCS it doesn't fork everything up. (via openorfice)
.NEW then it won't matter that it exist or that it's an "accepted" format to some body of people (read:"whoot we made a format")
.NEW format without someone going "wha..?" it'll be cool.
On another note, big deal. If the staffing agencies, govt or other commonly interfaced entities don't accept
When I can start sending my resume in
"Freedom and Justice for All" is a registered trademark of The United States Govt Inc. Not available in all areas.
I had never even heard of Oasis before this article. So I figured that this must be an impressive group of people, if they're designing standards, and at least the Slashdot editors think that those standards will make some ripples. Instead, the membership of this standards group consists of:
Tom Magliery Blast Radius Inc. Voting Member
Nathaniel Borenstein IBM Voting Member - Probation
Xiaowei Hu IBM Voting Member - Probation
Gary Edwards Individual Voting Member
David Faure Individual Voting Member
Patrick Durusau Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Voting Member
Michael Brauer Sun Microsystems* TC Chair
Lars Oppermann Sun Microsystems* Secretary
Instead, 8 seemingly random, average people are making this "standard". Who are these people? What are their qualifications?
On a similar note, my buddy and I came up with a new standard that should replace EDI for all intra-business communication. We'll have it up just as soon as my Geocities account is activated.
David Faure wrote this about the OASIS format support in KOffice:
Someone mistook this as a statement that kword will have all openoffice's features. Faure then clarified:
...
And most of them are trolling, or misinformed. Sure, you can probably come up with some fairly contrived examples where OO.o moves a margin 2mm further to the left (one-click fix) or spans a table over 2 pages (quick resize fix), but in most cases, Word itself has more trouble handling Word files. Especially files from previous versions.
You do have a point with the macros, however. Maybe further refinements of the new macro capabilities in OO.o will address migration.
C'mon people. HTML is the wave of the past AND the future. You're looking at it right now.
Even this dude's short sighted comment doesn't dispute HTML in any way. He mentions how some people want to edit a document they are sent, this is in no way prohibited by HTML.
HTML - Just use it. - Oh wait, you're using it right now!
I thought html was an open document format. The files are small, like a 100x or so smaller than .pdf.. any platform recognizes it. It's been around forever.
The whole 'new open format' discussion here seems to be centered around, "are they gonna support/embrace?" and not much about the features (I didn't RTFA and that's why it's annoying)... like the only reson for a new format is need for a standard.
There's probably something I don't get, some practical reason office suites aren't instead high level html generators that export tgz'd html doc/data..?
Most people here seem to be overlooking one thing: Yes, the open-source office software users do not have enough clout to force a switch, but a large part of that problem is the fracturing of users among the many viable options. The Abiword, Koffice, OO.o, and gnome suite users all have their own 'primary' formats (the is, the default format, and the one which the program best loads/saves). With the adoption of a real standard which unifies (essentially) all alternative software users makes all these users into a much more important and formitable group. Now we have a solid 3% of the desktop market (Linux users) plus everyone who uses OO.o to avoid the cost of buying Office/trouble of pirating it (which is another several percent).
.odt Word next quarter, but it very well may be the little push alternative/FOSS software needs to become mainstream supported.
Yes, this is small, but how many archaic formats does Office support that don't have a tenth that user base? In a version or two Office will certainly have support for odt. When that version is common enough, one will actually have slightly better chances of opening files with this format than office *.doc.
No, passing this standard won't force Microsoft to ship a native
"Fight for lost causes. You may discover they weren't."
Because the open document format has been finalized, it wouldn't be hard for the federal government to end the Microsoft monopoly once and for all. That is if the federal gov't has any interest in ending the monopoly. All they would have to do is announce that all future documentation be submitted with this format. That would force Microsoft to include that format in Office and could eventually lead to the end of MS Office requirements.
We are allowed to dream aren't we?
God knows why, but they are listed.
Microsoft is NOT a supporter of the OpenDocument format and it is very hard to believe they could sponsor its development. Only IBM and Sun are listed as "Sponsor-level members" on the OpenDocument TC Page so you would better check your sources before posting.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
HTML is the perfect document format for documentation. It's used by most large vendors. You can't expect people to be able to access every obscure open format around, but you can expect everyone to be able to access HTML. You're accessing it right now!
Who said anything about buying? ;)
The general negative comments about this have generally sounded like people are expecting this to "kill the beast" with one swift move. That is not the case.
:P
Currently, we have many great open source office suites. Great ones. However, they aren't that compatable with each other. A document written in one won't open in another and so forth. What this means now, is that we have compatability. That is the first step to slaying the beast that is MS Office.
Why is MS Office so bad?
- Filesize: MS Office files are alot larger then they need to be. Alot. Save a simple string of 10 words to see what I mean. Now do the same thing in a base level app, such as notepad
- Compatability with previous versions: MS's business model involves adding things to these formats that are deliberatly not backwards compatable. Why? To force customers to upgrade. Having *.docs there that you need to open, but cant, means that you need to upgrade your computer (read taht again, not just office, but the general population assumes that if something isn't working, a new computer, new windows, new office is the only thing that can fix it)
- Compatability with other programs: Programs that are not MS Office cannot open MS Office documents without spending alot of time reverse engineering them. If any other program did this, it would not survive. MS only does because it holds a vast majority of users.
- Office Help Assistant: QED
The thing alot of people don't realise is, that if they support open standards, it benifits the end customer. Often, the programs that support these standards are free. That includes upgrades, and access to vast amounts of help information. Not everyone that supports open source programs is a antisocial nerd
If someone came to me and said "I will give you a fully working OS, full Office suite, and I will give it to you for nothing" I'd be an idiot not to take it.
The only thing the open source community needs to do now is to get rid of the mindframe of the general public that "Open source is hard to use". Do that, and the beast is slain.
And again, people have let a perfect occasion slip by to define much more user-friendly file extensions. .sxw mean? You couldn't even guess it if you didn't happen to know) and this specification continues right along this path.
.textdocument, .spreadsheet, .audio or .video. If you need to include further info about format of the file, you can easily cascade the extension to form something like "artist_title.vorbis.ogg.audio". This way, even if you had never heard of Ogg Vorbis, you could still tell that the file in question is supposed to contain audio information.
The ones used by OOo are already a catastrophy from a usability viewpoint (what does
(The proposed extensions are shown on page 677 of the pdf document.)
Why do they, for example, insist on limiting the extensions to three characters? I can't imagine anyone using a document format defined in 2005 under MS-DOS.
What I would have liked to see would be file extensions that tell the user about the contents of the file in a universally understandable fashion, like
Looking at the page where they define the MIME-types and the file extensions it looks that's exactly what they have done for the MIME-types. Why not simply use those as the file extension? (/wo the "application/" prefix, of course)
A casual, non-technical user who gets confronted with a file name of the form "Meeting Summary.vnd.oasis.opendocument.text" might be slightly confused by the ".vnd.oasis." part, but unless he's a total moron or has never used computers at all, will no problem deducing that he's looking at a textdocument (and not a spreadsheet, a video, an image or a screensaver).
Somethinge like "Meeting Summary.odp", however, will probably even be a riddle for his system administrator.
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
You can make up all the "Microsoft always wins" scenarios you want, but the fact is that StarOffice and OpenOffice have already taken over 10 percent of the market away from MS Office, and their use continues to grow.
MSFT SOP: "embrace, extend, extinguish||patent".
Old saying: "Keep you're friends close, and you're enemies closer". (Sorry, origin unknown.) The best way MSFT has to "poison the well" of any new document standard that might encroach upon their monopolistic business plan is from the inside. How better to nudge the standards one way or another in a manner that guarantees ither non-adoption or adopting "the MSFT way"? (Remember how MSFT dealt with OpenGL, Java, and Kerberos?)
MSFT has "embraced" XML as a standard, and then wrapped it in an encrypted binary encapsulation.
The "extended" standard is then protected by DMCA and IP, with "open" licensing encumbered with NDA and SDK/source distribution limitations. "Their" XML format may be "opened" by other programs, but not "saved" by those other programs. This helps to preserve their monopoly status, as well as providing any/all proof needed (by the EU) that MSFT will not play fair, and must be punished.
The OpenDocument format is intended to provide an open alternative to proprietary document formats including the popular DOC, XLS, and PPT formats used by Microsoft Office.
so, if they are all about open standards and against proprietary formats, why put out the announcement in pdf, one of the most proprietary formats ever made?
When I opened this article I was thinking "yeah, right, who's going to make Microsoft use this?" The "who's going to make Microsoft use this argument has been something that I have seen as an absolute barrier to real open document formats for at least ten years.
But you're absolutely right, we'll get a huge win from just having a better open and widely used document format than HTML. Right now the open source office suites aren't really all that open other than being open-source. I'm not saying that's not huge, because it is, but you can be open-source and still lock people in [1], and we already know how easily a document format can lock you in to a single application. On top of that, if you think of the file format as an interface as well as a format, having a standard file format opens up the ability of people to write applications that operate on documents from all programs. Right now, in fact, one of the common reasons for exporting a document to HTML is not to display it in a web browser, but to get it into a format that's easier for another application to deal with, because there are an enormous number of applications already written that do interesting things with HTML.
[1] For example, GCC is open-source, but porting code written for GCC to other compilers can be soul-killing, because the language accepted by GCC is not an open standard... it's "the language accepted by GCC". Oh, it also accepts standard code, but it takes a deliberate and conscious commitment to write code that is both standards-conforming and portable to be "writing code with GCC" instead of "writing code for GCC". Every open source project that accepts a complex language - whether it's C or XML - has to face the same problem, and very few have faced the challenge of really supporting standards at all well.
Unfortunately, microsoft's infiltration of standards here and there doesn't actually constitute monopolistic behaviour. The reason being that any other company can come along with their own non-standard file type and application and still try to compete... the only problem being that their file types would have to be equally protected by DMCA and IP to ensure that MSFT didn't encroach on their territory except for being able to 'open', not 'save', the data. The only problem with Open Source competing with the likes of Microsoft is that they are largely naive to what is considered 'fair' play in the business world.
At a crucial time, the interoperability among Microsoft's office suite was its biggest asset. It was a huge driver for the adoption of the MS standard within corporations (plus the OS monopoly didn't hurt). Essentially, up until relatively recently (in corporate time), this type of interoperability has been enough.
Now, it is slowly beginning to dawn on corporations that the interoperability of enterprise-wide information systems is way more important than the interoperability of a crappy Office suite running on people's desktops. That is why the adoption of open standards is becoming crucial and, I would guess, inevitable in the long-run.
If Microsoft had a business model that involved providing useful tools to their customers they could have included the same functionality, with the same $0 in licensing costs to them.
They may not listen to their customers, but they do pay attention to the competition. MS has announced they are building a (probably completely proprietary) competitor to PDF into longhorn. I'm sure Word will output to that and PDF will be destroyed in the consumer and business space.
Open Standards makes a weak jab with a standard doc format. MS telegraphs an uppercut with their PDF-killer, with OS block in time?
(...dons tinfoil hat and sandals)
If an open standard is embraced software could then be judged on its own merit. We've all heard of more than a few people preferring the operation of MS Office to OpenOffice. And then again We've heard of people who prefer OpenOffice, Abiword, etc.
A non-proprietary standard has the ability to promote true market competition, true capitalism. This would benefit both the consumer and open new venture possibilities to a broader range of businesses.
Microsoft won for more important reasons than Wordperfect compatibility:
1. They had experience in GUI editing from the Mac platform. This is the key feature at the time Office established itself. We all forget how hard it was to learn WP and DOS. And what a pain it was even when you were proficient.
2. They bundled their office apps together, which was a pure value play by an upstart- like Hyundai now.
3. Taken as a group, their Office apps were better than their competition's.
4. Less technical issues- they really were less buggy than the competition's stuff, I remember WP6 very well, I was using it up to '99 (have pity on me, please!). OOO is a miracle of reliability compared to this early proprietary stuff.
Yeah, MS made it easy to switch, but that wasn't the key for business users - there wasn't an entire economy based on WP, as popular as it was. M$ started a cultural shift- between WP4DOS and Word for Windows, (between Windows 3.1 and 95), management started typing/writing their own stuff. It became cool, not just menial grunt work.
BTW, it's 2005 and you can still turn the Word window blue with white text, just like WP4DOS. And there's still an option for 'Navigation keys for Wordperfect users'. Which is just crazy - Wordperfect long ago changed THEIR menu to mimic Word's. But it's always easier to add than subtract features, eh? Or do you suppose the Word developers consider those features like big-game trophies?
... but you can't make him use Ogg.
"Approved" != "Adopted", and best of luck with that.
Why embrace archaic paradigms? Why force pages and line wraps on readers?
Yeah, if you're going to print a book you have no choice but to force pages and by extension line wraps. What is the benefit of book formatting unless you are printing a book?
If you are providing documentation, let the reader format the shape and size of the text to their own preferences. HTML formatting allows for plenty of organization without the need for pages or line wraps at all. Every web page you view uses this formatting after-all.
Even a very large document can be cleanly organized and efficiently navigated on a single page. However, if you have a large document you would like to break up in pages, then you are very able to create as many pages as you like.
As far as line wrapping is concerned, to say you have no control with HTML is an overstatement. Although I would again argue that you should leave the page width up to the reader, you can in fact easily control page width with the use of a table.
It's hard to ague against HTML as a viable document format when nearly everyone that uses a computer views an HTML document every time they use a computer.
Printing a document to paper is about the only argument against HTML with any legs. Yet, the simple and obvious answer is not to print documents to paper, that is a legacy procedure with vastly superior alternatives.
I don't use Word. Period. Then, when I send them an OpenOffice.org document that they can't open, I point them to the download or give them a CD. If they don't want to install it, they get my document on paper or PDF and can type it into Word themselves. If they don't want to do that, I guess my info was not important enough to them.
14 people now have OpenOffice.org that didn't before.
M$ .doc format is used by businesses sending documents around, but it's not a particularly good tool for the task. Business makes use of it because they pretty much have to, but nobody in their right mind would deliberately transform documents into .doc and back out again. The chances of losing information are just too high, even between versions of MS Word.
.doc files, but the real money will be in the steps before and after he gets the file, and that will all be ODF.
Compare Open Document. The specification is stable and transparent. Use of ODF as an intermediate format in workflows looks eminently sensible. When you need it in another format, it can be rendered into that format at the last possible moment. Converters need only be written once and each new converter adds another potential input/output to anybody's workflow. Tools can be written to understand ODF, pick it apart and do stuff. Tools can be strung end-to-end in pipelines, "unix philosophy" style.
In other words it could become to live documents what PDF is to "digital printout", and more.
M$ will support it as they are gradually pushed out onto the margins. Yes Joe Cubicle will still use
IT seems as if a lot of the comments in this thread are of a 'why bother' attitude, thinking that Microsoft will never adopt it. Well, the battle has just begun folks - there are still a LOT of ways this could play out...
1) All of the OTHER office programs now have a common format to use, and third parties have a standard 'input' for other processing - such as automatically making html, pdf, docbook, or some other format. With one well-documented standard, each tool can concentrate on doing one thing well.
2) Microsoft won't budge on this until they feel the heat from their customers - so people who care must start educating people. The more people who start asking for this format, the more pressure Microsoft will feel. The average joe isn't going to be able to put much pressure, but what if a big contract at the Department of Defense included a requirement that said, "All deliverables must be in OpenDocument format."? The companies bidding on that contract sure would care... And SAIC, Lockheed Martin, etc can put a LOT of pressure on Microsoft.
3) If Microsoft expressed any interest, it will initially be as a 'migration path away from all those inferior products', and they will read the format perfectly. They won't allow users to save in that format without the pressure I mention above, and even when they do, it will probably be buggy, and throw up so many 'Warning: You are saving your document in OpenDocument. That may cause you to lose page formatting' messages that users will have no faith in the OpenDocument format.
Don't give up the battle yet - the fun is just beginning!
Write your new EDI standard in Esperanto.
It's the universal language. Soon everybody will be speaking it!
You are saying extend HTML instead of creating a new format that must be learned in addition to HTML. I couldn't agree more. Others have pointed out other projects that they seem to be implying do exactly what you suggest. Yet, I'm very suspicious if these other formats are indeed nothing more than a few more tags thrown in to HTML. I'm not familiar with them, and since I have never personally needed more control than HTML (with the exception of php), I don't care to go try to find out what they are.
.moz files when they can only be opened with Mozilla browsers?
You my friend are very logical, I like you. HTML is used by everyone hundreds of times a day. Millions of people already know HTML. Thousands of HTML editors already exist. Which is better, add a few tags to HTML that most people probably don't need anyway but can easily learn if ever they do, or create an entirely new format with a 680 page manual to learn how to use?
A format that is incompatible with every editor now in existence, that needs mass adoption to become useful at all.
I would say that it might not be too harmful if HTML documents could be easily converted, as I'm sure is the case, but it's just so stupid. Stupidity is harmful.
It's really all about ego. That's the biggest problem with the OSS community. Everyone wants to be the leader of something doing things their way so one project splinters off into dozens of smaller projects all incompatible with each other.
What are the most successful OSS projects? Apache and Mozilla. In both cases they were working with a standard they had to conform to. Think about what a disaster it would be if Apache or Mozilla decided to make their own "open" standard. Who is going to use
You want an open document standard that can compete with Word? Extend HTML. Or just champion the use of HTML like it is as it has everything 99.99% of us need.
I like it. Good job!
"Keep you're friends close, and you're enemies closer". (Sorry, origin unknown.)
I've often heard this attributed to Sun Tzu, from "The Art of War". Haven't read it myself, so I don't know true that is.
You are saying extend HTML instead of creating a new format that must be learned in addition to HTML. I couldn't agree more. Others have pointed out other projects that they seem to be implying do exactly what you suggest. Yet, I'm very suspicious if these other formats are indeed nothing more than a few more tags thrown in to HTML.
.doc and MS). It's not about ego, it's about the right tool for the right job. Imagine a spreadsheet marco that is 2000 lines long in plain math, then add markup to it to generate a HTML table, then add a few lines to make sure that non-standards compilant browsers can read it... HTML is not the right tool for paper documents, spreadsheets and/or presentations.
.moz files when they can only be opened with Mozilla browsers?
XSLT is XML with style sheets.
XML goes into XSLT and comes out in a number of differnet formats. It's the power of LaTex, but the ease of use of HTML.
I'm not familiar with them, and since I have never personally needed more control than HTML (with the exception of php), I don't care to go try to find out what they are.
I hate there isn't a solution that does X, oh there is? Well, I'm too lazy to try it.
Millions of people already know HTML.
Maybe a million know HTML, the others know how to write illegal tags that IE can fudge into something presentable.
Thousands of HTML editors already exist.
Few WYSIWYG editors produce the best HTML for document. Many produce illegal HTML.
Which is better, add a few tags to HTML that most people probably don't need anyway but can easily learn if ever they do, or create an entirely new format with a 680 page manual to learn how to use?
Have any idea how long the HTML spec is? 680 isn't bad...
A format that is incompatible with every editor now in existence, that needs mass adoption to become useful at all.
Much like HTML and XML needed a dogs age ago. Much like the standards to HTML that still need to be more widely adopted.
I would say that it might not be too harmful if HTML documents could be easily converted, as I'm sure is the case, but it's just so stupid. Stupidity is harmful.
It's really all about ego. That's the biggest problem with the OSS community. Everyone wants to be the leader of something doing things their way so one project splinters off into dozens of smaller projects all incompatible with each other.
This is a standard. It takes a lot of time and effort to put out a standard, because a lot of people working on different project need to agree to the standard. This isn't some people in issolation creating a document format, idependant of what other companies need and want (like
What are the most successful OSS projects? Apache and Mozilla. In both cases they were working with a standard they had to conform to.
A standard, much like this one, that someone wrote. This is a standard, which future software will conform to. Nothing more.
Think about what a disaster it would be if Apache or Mozilla decided to make their own "open" standard.
They did, and so did Microsoft... Then, finally, they put their guns away and wrote the new standard xhtml. I suppose your history of browser development and standards is as lacking as awareness of other technologies?
Who is going to use
Ask people using MS Word that question. That is the problem this STANDARD is going to solve.
You want an open document standard that can compete with Word?
It's not cometing with word... It's competing with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Lotus Notes, RTF, et al. And because there are so many people with their own file formats, a STANDARD has been drafted. Much like when there were several versions of hypertext, and a standard was written. Or before that when there was several protocols for sending and receiving data over the web and HTTP won out and made a standard (by being open no
Perhaps MS won't support it, but couldn't a third party make themselves rich by creating an interface between the document format and MS Office products? Or is the API for Office too locked up to allow this? I think document conversion would be nice, but what would really take the cake would be 'Save as...' and 'Open...' options to address the open format directly.
Its great that we have a final, standardized version of Open Document Format. But there was some talk a while back that EU might choose this as their standard. That would really turn the tables on Microsoft, with Koffice and OpenOffice using it as standard and Microsoft playing catchup. Anyone know what happened?
Ok I will plug PrintFu too. Hell, I can use the buck.w .oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/12027/offi ce-spec-1.0-cd-3.pdf&pppemail=colincrane@gmail.com
www.printfu.org/?mcAction=pdfURL&pdfURL=http://ww
Hm, Word files might not be the smallest but you cannot compare wordprocessing document with a plain text file, there is lots of info other than the text that is stored in the document.
But back to the OASIS standard: did you happen to notice how verbose the XML mark up in that standard is? I would not be suprised if the Word doc was actually smaller than the equivalent OASIS doc.
"How do you print out a Wiki effectively?"
How do you print out a web page? Just print the links on their own pages. Wiki 'gathers' a bunch of information by allowing you to access it. If you're printing it out, you've cut off that option so you need to print out to the level required. (A page with the WikiLinks on it would make an acceptable ToC. If you want an index, file them out locally and use the word processor's facilities.)
"How do you attach it in an e-mail? I just send the link. Beats sending an entire file.
"Submit it for a publication?" I just send out the link. Publication doesn't really apply here.
I've been using Wikis for years and that what I do.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Wow... I guess I lost out in the moderator lottery today! My poor attempt at humour may have fallen flat but it was certainly not meant as a troll.
I was kidding, okay? Obviously, PDF is a good choice for a document like that when they want page-level formatting and such, and when the new format described is not ubiquitous or implemented yet. (Parent was meant as a joke about bootstrapping a new format.) PDF is open and is great with the right tools -- Preview and the "Save as PDF" buttons in OS X rock! (Though I've done the same thing for years in Windows, using a generic PS printer driver, the save to file button in the print dialog box and ps2pdf -- OS X just makes it far more convenient.) And between open tools like Ghostscript, pdftk, pdflatex, Scribus and anything else that produces PS or PDF directly, it's possible to do quite a bit. I've also found it wonderful for archiving interesting papers and other documents useful to my research.
What about LaTeX? There are GUIfied front ends for it.
...'coz the situation won't last since TrollTech improved the rules for the Win32 version of their Qt libraries.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How about source = Oasis-Open?
Microsoft is listed as a sponsor member of Oasis-Open on the front page. There was no claim that they were a voting member. Only that they sponsored the organization.
Then you hopefully will be pleased to know that one of the "troll" mods has been metamoderated as "unfair".
The more I metamoderate, the more I realize that those who use "troll" for statements like the grandparent's are completely humorless and/or can't deal with any idea that differs from their own.