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Norway Mandates Government Use of ODF and PDF

Posted by Zonk on from the playing-nice-with-everyone dept.

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."

3 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. What about postscript? by Entropius · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I honestly don't know the technical ends and outs of either format (I'm a physicist, not a CS... albeit one who had to fuss at his students this semester for turning in crap in .docx format after I told them plaintext), but why the choice of pdf over postscript for the "formatting preserved" format? My department seems to use them pretty interchangeably... and aren't there tons of tools that do nifty things to postscript? (ps2* and *2ps style things?)

    Does it compress better or something?

    1. Re:What about postscript? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I'd better qualify that. Many Adobe Postscript rendering engines will render PDF directly. There are lots of printers that do, many of them do not, however, advertise the feature. GhostScript seems to try but not do as well. The actual image stream is a tokenized logical subset of PostScript, the image model is the same and there is a 1:1 mapping of operators. There's extra stuff in the file that isn't part of the image stream.

      It's been 15 years since I've picked up the black-and-white book which defines PDF.

      Thanks

      Bruce

      --
      Bruce Perens.
  2. Highly Competent Engineering by pipingguy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Norskies are also pretty open about engineering standards: http://www.standard.no/

    Most companies jealously guard their "intellectual property", Norway makes most of theirs freely available.

    It ain't the books or documentation that make a project successful, it's the people.