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Norway Moves Towards Mandatory Use of ODF and PDF
Andy Updegrove writes "Norway has become the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use. The Norwegian recommendation was revealed by Minister of Renewal Heidi Grande Roys, on behalf of the Cabinet-appointed Norwegian Standards Council. If adopted, it would require all government agencies and services to use these two formats, and would permit other formats (such as OOXML) to be used only in a redundant capacity.Reflecting a pragmatic approach to the continuing consideration of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1, the recommendation calls for Norway to 'promote the convergence of the ODF and OOXML, in order to avoid having two standards covering the same usage.' According to the press release, the recommendation will be the subject of open hearings, with opinions to be rendered to the Cabinet before August 20 this summer.The Cabinet would then make its own (and in this case binding) recommendation to the Norwegian government."
This is excellent news. I'm expecting the US to be one of the last to adopt it because of the influence MS has on politics. Any thoughts?
Res publica non dominetur
First, let me say that I like the concept of a single file format that can be read by any computer and displays in a consistent manner. From that aspect, I applaud PDF.
However, the current implementation requires that I have a bloated reader that typically includes Additional Crap (tm) in the installation which installs by default (if even given the option). The reader insists in "improving performance" by running a program in my system tray for which I must remove the configuration myself (no option).
This is also the same reason that I hate Quick Time, so it isn't limited to a single file type.
Layne
The results of this investigation seem obvious to me. They'll find that there are no significant features of the OOXML format that aren't already replicated by ODF. They will also find that OOXML is needlessly complicated by support for odd bugs and backward compatibility issues with previous Microsoft Office releases. Finally, they will find that a dozen or so major software providers are actively supporting ODF while only Microsoft is actively promoting OOXML.
After the report is released, Microsoft money will step in and suppress it. The guys who wrote the report will be fired, and a new report will be written recommending OOXML as an "industry standard" with "longstanding vendor support". ODF supporters will be recast as small companies that could go belly up at any time. The whole standardization effort will collapse in the backlash, and nothing will get done.
On the bright side, they're keeping up the good fight. Without this pressure, nothing will ever change.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
> Other formats may be used however, as long as documents with the same content are available at the same time in ODF or PDF.
I suppose this is to limit opposition from MS and crew, but it's a bad idea. How's going to audit every document to be sure they're in sync?
Make a choice and stick with it.
I agree that patent-free formats is good. However, one must specify something or run the risk of having numerous open formats chosen by anyone who might have a say. While this may be good for "freedom", it is not so good when you actually have to get something done. As ODF is now an ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard it seems to meet the requirements better than most options.
Will it become obsolete? Surely. But it will have better staying power than just about anything else I've seen to this date.
Sounds like the Scandinavian countries are too out-of-line. I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't petitioned the U.S. government to nuke them or at least go on a bombing campaign against these shameless eco(nomy)-terrorists.
Exactly the same argument could have been made for railway guages, and yes, here in the UK we curse the decision to use 4'8.5" (I think, I'm sure someone will correct me) instead of Brunell's 6' but at least rolling stock can run on most tracks in the country.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I like KPDF as well and that's my default viewer, but look at what is coming: Okular promises to be, if not an Acroread killer, at least a very serious contender. Note that this is KDE4 stuff (ergo Qt4, ergo it may easily be on Windows machines by year's end!).
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Microsoft appears to be making moves towards turning a profit whether people accept their software or not. They can try to profit from Free and Open Source Software by ensuring that it must implement "patented" technology in OOXML. Just look at their latest insinuations regarding FOSS and Microsoft "patents" -- OpenOffice.org (which supports ODF) is in that list and it doesn't even have OOXML support!
If ODF is ever merged with OOXML then Microsoft will try to force free software developers to turn the same tricks Novell has. Or perhaps it will go after users in a RIAA-like rampage. This is why ODF should be protected from Microsoft's influence and OOXML (or any new standard Microsoft participates in) should probably remain untouched for at least 20 years.
Does this mean that closed formats are now pining for the fjords?
A white paper based on a technical comparison between the ODF and OOXML formats
...the OOXML "standard" is terrible from a technical point-of-view, even if you forget about Microsoft's motivation behind it.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Although I use LaTeX myself for most of my document production needs, asking government employees to use LaTeX to produce documents is probably a little bit unrealistic, no matter what you or I might think about the ease of document production using a TeX-based system. Publishers and professionals will continue to use tools like LaTeX, because in those sectors there are professionals who handle layout and expecting them to be able to use powerful but occasionally cryptic software is not at all unreasonable (authors rarely ever make decisions on how to layout the text of a book they've written). But here, we're talking about people that aren't layout professionals and who are used to WYSIWYG tools, for whom LaTeX would present an unreasonable learning curve.
LaTeX and TeX look great and are arguably still better than most of their direct competitors, and certainly produce documents that look vastly superior to those produced by WYSIWYG programs (as Knuth quipped, "What you see is all you get"). But the government is more concerned about content and the ease of producing it than how it looks. They also probably aren't typesetting complex mathematical formulae, which has historically been TeX's great strength.
And before anyone says as much, yes, I have heard of LyX -- but if you think you're getting all of TeX's power using a TeX editor like that, you'd be wrong. Plus, at that point, how is TeX superior to ODF? You may not realize this, but TeX (like PostScript) is a Turing complete language, complete with branches and loops, and there's no way that any editor, no matter how feature rich, could duplicate that level of complexity, for the same reason that there are no "WYSIWYG" tools for creating applications that duplicate all the functionality of C, C++, Java, C#, whatever.
You may think, "that's ok, let's just support a subset!" Not a bad idea (that is, in fact, what PDF does -- it implements a subset of PostScript that is not anywhere near as complex). But then you really have to make it a subset and only a subset, otherwise I might decide to edit the LaTeX code you wrote with your word-processor by hand and unknowingly create a beautiful document that no one can edit using WYSIWYG tools, because I strayed outside of the supported subset of the language.
Plus, people these days are gravitating towards XML-based formats, and for good reason: XML is easy to parse, standard, and ubiquitous. Using a non-XML based standard like some TeX-subset means having a completely different parser internally. XML is also structured as a tree, which makes dynamic content generation easy, whereas TeX, which was designed to be much more flexible, eschews such restrictions (to our great annoyance, as we cannot support all its exotic features for the reasons outlined above anyway).
Every time this sort of discussion comes up, someone invariably says "What about TeX?" Hopefully I've shed some light on why that's not really workable or ideal.
Norwegian doesn't come in two variants you dolt. There's a multitude of dialects that vary a lot and two written forms based on these. One is bokmål and the other is nynorsk. Bokmål, literally, book-language, is mostly based on danish, while nynorsk is closer to the original old norse language. From a linguistic point, nynorsk is the natural successor of old norse while bokmål is a norwegianized danish. Very few people actually speak like the forms are written, most speak some sort of dialect where a lot of the 'correct' grammar orally is not correct if written.
Rest in peace Malin "looxn" Kristiansen. We miss you...
Unfortunately, TeX's Turing-completeness is implemented as a macro-expansion language. I use LaTeX for everything that's more than one page, and it is nice that I can still handle 15-year-old documents (except for the images which were tied to the emTeX printer drivers...), but it really sucks to change the layout because it is all in an almost-unstructured mess of macro expansions. Variable scoping rules are weird, you're restricted to max 255 counter variables, it can't do true floating-point arithmetic, and so on. In practice, you're dependent on packages written by TeX gurus, that often don't cooperate with each other.
It's time for a successor to (La)TeX. It's great what TeX can do given that it was originally designed to run on 1982-era hardware, but now we could use something that has less obscure internals so that mere mortals can extend its functionality. And the successor could have things like native unicode support, elegant interfacing with type-1 and truetype fonts, left-to-right and up-down scripts, and so on.
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