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Norway Mandates Government Use of ODF and PDF
siDDis writes "Earlier this year Slashdot mentioned that Norway was moving towards mandatory use of ODF and PDF. Now it's official: the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009. There are three formats that have been mandated for all documentation between authorities, users and partners. HTML for all public information on the Web, PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved and ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit. Documents may also be published in other formats, but they must always be available in either ODF or PDF."
My vote would be 'no' on postscript. The tools aren't as commonly installed (or as refined) as PDF. Worse, I believe .ps files commonly do not include the fonts they rely on, leading to lots of headaches. For that and whatever other reasons, .ps is a cavalcade of "execution stack" error messages, while pdf always works.
Joke or no, but "Translated by hand"?
By someone who doesn't know Norwegian, or?
That's a machine translation. The words are unusual (to say the least) and the grammar is wrong.. e.g. "åpen standarder" should read "åpne standarder". "har bestemte det" should read "har bestemt at", etc.
Does it compress better or something?
Yes. For pages of pure bitonal content, the JBIG2 image compression scheme can produce files approximately 30-40x smaller than the equivalent using CCITT G4. This is such a massive improvement that it makes it tempting to simply represent all documents in raster form with ancillary text information -- in other words, it competes with vector graphics as far as side. No other widely supported potential archival format provides JBIG2. This in itself is an enormous benefit, but not quite a deal-maker for PDF.
PDF really shines in that it is easy to parse and has a limited, well-defined graphics language. The PDF/A standard even further restricts the classes of operations a conformant file can perform. On top of other things, it spells out the requirements for fonts, to ensure that documents rendered in the future will appear as intended. It also dictates that details of the document's semantic structure be embedded to assist analysis of the archived data in the future.
I probably sound like a shill for PDF, but that isn't the case. I simply write commercial code which deals with PDF. It is a terrible shame that Adobe's viewer products have made such a bad impression on everyone. I believe PDF is a well-designed, simple, extensible format with a hell of a lot going for it, if you simply discount everything with the word "Adobe" in it.
That would be like the Australian Tax Office requiring IE for some business reporting. The standard response is that you can do it or be fined. At least they've fixed the need for specific versions of the JVM.
This was a few years back, but maybe they've changed. Then again, it's the tax office.
All of that said, proper PDF is PostScript. You can feed it to the PostScript interpreter and it will render. It's not full PostScript, but a subset that is easier to process and isn't a full interpretive language as PostScript is. I've wrtten programs in PostScript that have nothing to do with printing, it's a bit similar to Forth.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
The circular. I think this is missing some details that were recommended (like don't encrypt your postscript) that may appear elsewhere.
Bruce Perens.
Postscript is a programming language; that's why you can have stack errors. PDF is purely declarative.
Gah, way to want to reset the clock by 10-12 years. PDF was developed because shuffling PostScript files around was tedious and error prone. The files are large, they don't contain fonts, and since they are plaintext the cr/cr-lf/lf line end issue can affect the file on different OS's, etc... The publishing industry labored under PostScript for far too long. The first P in PDF stands for Portable for a reason. It's a far more portable format than *.ps.
Press release, published 21.12.2007
Equal access to public information for all citizens in Norway
Open document standards to be obligatory for state information
The Norwegian Government has decided that all information on state-operated web sites should be accessible in the open document formats HTML, PDF or ODF. This means an end to the time when public documents are published in closed formats only.
- Everybody should have equal access to public information. From 2009 on, Norwegian citizens will be able to freely choose which software to use to get access to information from public offices. More competition between suppliers of office programs will be another effect of the government's decision, Minister of Government Administration and Reform Heidi Grande Røys says.
The Government's decision is as follows:
* HTML will be the primary format for publishing public information on the Internet.
* PDF (PDF 1.4 and later or PDF/A ISO 19005-1) is obligatory when there is a wish to keep a document's original appearance.
* ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) is to be used to publish documents to which the user should be able to make changes after downloading, e.g. public forms to be filled out by the user. This format is also made obligatory.
- For many years, Norway had no specific software policy. This is now changing. Our government has decided that ICT development in the public sector shall be based on open standards. In the future, we won't accept that government bodies are locking users of public information to closed formats, Ms Grande Røys says.
The new demands will take effect from January 1, 2009 for state bodies. The Ministry of Government Administration and Reform will be working to formulate regulations making this obligatory for municipal organs as well. The Government's aim is that the regulations should take force from January 1, 2009.
The government decision does not prevent state bodies from using other document formats in their communication with the users, provided that the documents also are produced in one of the obligatory formats, ODF or PDF.
Heidi Grande Røys says that state and municipal organs as well should be able to receive documents in these formats from their users and partners.
- This is the first step in standardising document formats. We are also considering formats for document exchange with the public sector and for the exchange of documents within the public sector, Ms Grande Røys says.
A list of obligatory and recommended standards in the public sector according to the Government's recent decision is to be found in Referansekatalog for IT-standarder i offentlig sektor (Reference catalogue of IT standards in the public sector, Norwegian edition only).
It makes sense to specify a single format, and ODF is the only standard format that currently suits the purpose and is free to be implemented by anyone.
There may be a minority of people using it, but i don't believe any of those people would be forced to pay extra to be able to.
As for sending files back in the format you sent, what happens if they're sending something new and aren't aware what format you want?
Aside from the fact that the government will need to maintain a large selection of apps to support all the different formats, and they have to draw the line somewhere... Otherwise what's to stop someone creating their own proprietary format and then charging the government for a program capable of reading it?
The cost of supporting multiple formats is prohibitive, and forcing the use of a proprietary format just pushes an unnecessary cost burden onto the people and makes the online government services less accessible.
Instead, if they support only a small set of standard formats, they reduce their own costs and any users who can't use the files can be pointed to a free download or provided with free apps on cd.
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I've also written my share of PostScript code and agree to most of the things you said. Except one - PDF isn't PostScript. PostScript doesn't support alpha channel but PDF does, which is a major difference. If you render e.g. translucent gradients having a nonlinear shape into a PDF file, there is no way to convert the resulting vector graphics into PostScript (other than bitmap, that is).
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Having just tried, i found that in openoffice...
Backspace deletes the contents of a cell without prompting you (you can still undo)
Delete brings up a dialog allowing you to delete not just the contents but also any formatting, or to choose exactly what to remove... You can make it just remove formatting, or numbers, or text, or formulae etc... Very useful to strip numbers from a large block of cells without affecting formatting or textual content.
As for web queries i don't know, tho i know quite a few people who do the same as you with various scripts backing up to more serious databases.
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