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South Africa Adopts ODF as a Government Standard

Posted by Zonk on from the few-down-few-dozen-to-go dept.

ais523 writes "As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards (pdf) for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out)."

3 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Why not let their computers do it? by NemoinSpace · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March,
    You think it would be hard enough to get computers to read odf, now they are mandating people do it? Won't someone think of the children!
  2. Re:Ironic by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What is with the PDF allergy exhibited by a number of slashdotters?

    It works fine in both xpdf and gs. In fact I've never encountered a PDF which doesn't display in either of those. Further more, as well as high-quality Free (tm) readers, there are also plenty of high quality Free tools for generating PDFs.

    Seeing as the readers are small and lightweight, PDF is a better choice for final documents than ODF.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  3. Damn, they beat us at the rugby... by rHBa · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...and they beat us to open standards!!!