Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker

Andy Updegrove writes "In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, of Germany's SoftMaker Software. Most people know about OpenOffice, StarOffice, and KOffice, the ODF poster child software suites. But there are also other products available as well, including this one, which bundles word processing and spreadsheet capabilities (with more modules on the way), runs on both Windows, Linux and mobile platforms, is designed for home users, is available on-line, is localized in many languages - and is dirt cheap, besides. It's also been selected by AMD for use in connection with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015. This interview series amply demonstrates how a useful standard - in this case ODF - can rapidly lead to the evolution of a rich and growing environment of compliant products, providing customers with variety, choice, price competition, and proprietary as well as open source product alternatives - in stark contrast to the situation that has prevailed in office suite software for the last many years."

Comments

Great product, but not quite ODF

[rduke15]

A very misleading article and submission.

I'm a big fan of TextMaker, which is SoftMaker's word processor. (I don't know the rest of the "suite").

But even though it is a really good word processor, it is hardly "ODF-compliant". In fact, this is my main problem with the program. By default, it stores documents in it's own proprietary format. It can save as MS-Word, which is what I do as a "lesser evil": it's also proprietary, but at least it is so widely used that I can expect to find converters for a long time. There is an .odt importer, but the exporter is still "in the works".

I don't want import/export filters. I want my word processor to use an open document format natively, by default. So I hope they will eventually completely switch to ODF.

Then of course, if the ODF is such a monstruosity as OpenOffice, I can understand why SoftMaker doesn't jump on the bandwagon... (yes, that's flamebait, but I mean it...:-)

An alternative would be to comletely open up the specification to their own format.

Re:Great product, but not quite ODF

[martin-k]

We are already working on ODF export, and it will be featured in a free servicepack later this year. When this is done, OpenDocument will be added as one of the "default file formats", i.e., you can set TextMaker to create OpenDocument documents by default.

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Re:BTW, ODF is a file format

[Amouth]

i wish i could post back to my own comments on this last time..

when reading a document like ODF (and anything based on XML) you have to read the whole file in to understand any of it (i know this isn't exact but i don't want to type it all out) with a binary format like a doc file.. what you need first is first.. you can understand a section by jumping to it and geting just that portion instead of the whole thing..

it is the same with saving.. updating portions of the file instead of the whole thing.

ODF is nice in that it is human readable and easy to write code to read and write them BUT it is slow.. you can only optmize so much in code.. if your working with a bad layout you can only go so fast

MS has spent years optimizing the doc format ODF was not thought out for speed.

Catastrophe coming

[Colin Smith]

ODF is a format which can now be relied upon from now into the future. Something not to be sniffed at when archiving (or exchanging) information. Why do you think it's being demanded by government offices all over the world so soon after becoming a draft?

MS lost the war on the 3rd of May 2006. They just don't know it yet. ISO 26300 commoditises the format of word/spreadsheet/database files. It's a lynchpin which has just been pulled from MS Office (and therefore Windows). From now they're going to have to compete on price and merit.

Independants can now take advantage of that without having to run to keep up with the doc format, though that's still going to be an issue for a few years as ODF replaces doc as the standard format. That's the catastrophe, slow at first and accelerating out of control rapidly as the market does what governments couldn't.

Re:Catastrophe coming

[amliebsch]

Why do you think it's being demanded by government offices all over the world so soon after becoming a draft?

Why, for the same reason that all government offices make any decision, of course: because it's the sensible, logical, cost-effective thing to do.

Hmm, it's the 49ers all over

[rucs_hack]

What we have here gentlemen and lady who wandered onto the wrong site by mistake, is a good old fashioned goldrush.

Folks hear tell there's some erosion happening in the Microsoft foothills, and they want to stake a claim.

Next comes a marketplace awash with Wannabe Microsoft Office clones, all trying to eke some small living off the Open format that can be like the holy 'doc', and which they desperatelly hope is a way to get a decent market share. Sorry guys, the junkies aint switching, it's create an entirely new market or die.

I use ODF for *everything*, it's great, but these companies have got to realise, if all they can do is ape Office, then they're going against a battleship in a rowboat.

ODF brings a chance to create something new, a way to store documents in a unified format that means there will never be a place or time when they cannot be accessed. Not just the next few years, but centuries from now.

Microsoft have *never* offered this, unless the entire world plays their tune, and in spite of what you may have been told, there have been area's in computing where microsoft has never been able to venture. Without that they couldn't hope to dominate documents of all types, and you know they'd like to.

ODF can though, it has one huge advantage. Being an Open standard, it can be modified in full public view. Things will only ever be added if they enhance the document format itself, not to suite the perceived needs of a single vendor.

The only way to really exploit ODF is to break away from MSOffice like atributes, and start making something different and new.

I tries Microsoft Office out the other day

[Procyon101]

I was using a Windows box the other day. Overall, the OS seemed solid and polished, so I installed MS Office.

Office opened up, I typed some characters... simple first steps. All seemed to be in order, so I go to try it out with some of my documents.

I go to open a document I have opened with a few other Word Processors.. nothing. Word can't read any of my standard ODF documents. All my other word processing software can read Word docs, but Microsoft can't read the basic, common denominator standard. So much for that.

So, on to spreadsheets. Open up an open document format spreadsheet with Excell. Excell somehow thinks this is a CSV formatted file of all things. I can't use any of my existing spreadsheets on this new software.

Rather than spen untold painful hours converting everything, I uninstalled office and installed OOo for Windows. It seems that MS has alot of work to do to bring their office suite up to par with current standards. As it is, it seems barely useable, *IF* you can get access to a Windows machine and only if that machine has MS Office installed, which is a fairly rare combination from where I stand. I wonder why I don't see more "Windows isn't ready for the desktop" comments, because from my vantage point, that's the impression I get every time I struggle to use the damn stuff.

Re:BTW, ODF is a file format

[mmurphy000]

when reading a document like ODF (and anything based on XML) you have to read the whole file in to understand any of it

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

Counter-proof: pull parsers and StAX.

with a binary format like a doc file.. what you need first is first..

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

Counter-proof: ZIP files have their table-of-contents at the end of the file.

you can understand a section by jumping to it and geting just that portion instead of the whole thing

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

it is the same with saving.. updating portions of the file instead of the whole thing.

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

And please don't cite that RAR vs. Solid RAR nonsense from your previous post. Your analysis of RAR vs. Solid RAR is spot-on, but you have not demonstrated how either RAR's or Solid RAR's performance can be used as a predictor of the performance of .doc or ODF or hamster wheels or anything else.