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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."
Actually, it's not ironic.
.doc...
PDF is an open format, with many non-acrobat readers for it. And one can't expect it to be in the format which the document specifies... it just got approved after all.
It would be ironic if it were in
What other office suites? You mean all the office suites except OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice and the Gnome Office project, which all are planning to use/are already using it?
Roses are #FF0000, violets are #0000FF, all my base are belong to you
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.
You CAN get the PDF specifications directly from the Adobe, it has not been reverse engineered: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/ind ex_reference.html