Slashdot Mirror
UOF Vies to Be a Third Contender in ODF–OOXML Battle
Andy Updegrove writes "Long-time followers of the ODF-OOXML story will recall that there is a third editable, XML-based document format in the race to create the documentary record of history. That contender is called UOF, for Uniform Office Format, and it has been under development in China since 2002. Last summer, UOF was adopted as a Chinese National Standard, and on Friday the first complete office suite based upon UOF was released. It's called Evermore Integrated Office 2009 (EIOffice 2009 for short). How successful could this new entrant be in China? For starters, Evermore Software Co. Ltd., its developer, is reportedly the largest software vendor to the Chinese government. And then there's price: Evermore's professional edition is less than a quarter of the price of the comparable version of Office 2007. And finally, it's clearly no coincidence that on July 11, Evermore Vice President Cao Shen called for Microsoft to be the first target for China's new anti-monopoly law, which will take effect in just ten days' time. Whether Shen is speaking to, or for, the government remains to be seen."
How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
One or two. And one or two for spreadsheets, and presentations, and so on.
The point is that it should be the right one or two. It would kind of suck if that extension ended up being TXT, right?
Since anything official (courts government, etc.) has to be in PDF these days
Unless it's Excel -- which was the case last time I looked at the federal budget, if I recall.
why not just use Acrobat for all of it? Who cares if it's closed source?
PDF != Acrobat.
PDF actually is an open standard, and is well supported by several open readers. While there are many Adobe-specific quirks, and Acrobat is arguably the worst PDF reader out there (heh, I just typoed it "Acrobad"), PDF is still very useful in a lot of contexts.
There are two problems with this: First, PDF is read-only (not everything should be).
Second, your mother doesn't know how to save as PDF. She'll still send you whatever the default format for her office suite is. It would really help if that default format was something we all know how to read -- that's the point of having a standard, so we don't have to think about this anymore.
So, you see, you actually should care about this debate -- precisely because if we win, no one will have to think about it anymore.
How about native support for mkv video? That would be news. How about native 64 bit software?
Both of these already exist.
let's just cook up a new extension for text files
And that about shows your complete lack of understanding.
It's not just a "new extension", it's actually a different file format -- there's a lot more work that has to go into this than typing "odt" instead of "doc".
And it's not just word processing. It's presentations, spreadsheets, pretty much all office formats. But sure, let's pick the least useful of these for our most common example...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You are joking, right?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Here is software that will convert between ODF and UOF, written by the Open Standard Lab of Peking University. In the process of writing this software, they have been participating in the UOF standardization process and talking with ODF folks to make sure the two formats can be converted well.
The UOF is a written standard approved by the Chinese national standardization bodies - not just "whatever ElOffice does". I don't know if there is an english translation - I have been able to find one with google.
is quite common in China. However, as for UOF, this is not totally due to the Chinese standardization body. When the idea of the UOF standard was forming in 2002, ODF had not been on its standardization track yet. It turned out that the development of UOF was slower and ODF got ahead.
Another example of this kind of NIH is the standards for Chinese character encoding. There are a series of "GBxxxxx" standards (GB is for Guo-Biao, acronym for national standard in Chinese) which are totally incompatible with Unicode, but both GB and Unicode are widely used China, causing a great deal of pain and trouble. Some Web developers, unaware of the character encoding problem, screw up the Web pages by sending the wrong header or using the wrong XML declaration. Some email programs automatically fuck up your email's encoding. This also made distributed development more difficult.
Usually the "invented-here" standards are not technically better than the others. Some of them are too restricted in scope (e.g. the GB encodings can handle English, Chinese, Japanese kana and the Cyrillic alphabet, but few others). But now it may be too late to make a change.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
PowerPC beat you to it: enforce in-order execution of I/O
Sure. If you believe that I have a fifth: ASCII plain text.
90% of business documents oculd be in this format with no loss of information, a 99% reduction in size and ability to use any number of tools to search and organise it.
But the PHBs want to use Comic Sans and paste movies into their memos.
There's LyX. It's certainly different from your standard word processor, so that might be a bit off-putting for "typical" users. But it'd be a heck of a lot friendlier for them than vi/emacs + make. It comes with lots of tutorials that explain in detail why it's different from most word processors, and why that's better. If you haven't yet seen it, I'd say it's worth a look.
Hah, beat me to it.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile>/chrome/userContent.css
/* Override the default boxing bar */
.contain {
/* Override the boxing bar when replying */
.inline_comment {
@-moz-document domain(slashdot.org) {
border-color: -moz-use-text-color #FFFFFF rgb(255, 255, 255) !important;
}
border: 0px;
margin: 1.5em;
}
}
Rules without !important are overruled by author rules if the author sets any. Rules with !important overrule author rules.
The only thing that makes userContent.css an excruciatingly painful experience is the fact that you actually have to _restart_ Firefox after making any changes. How 1994 is that?
Perfect is the enemy of done.
Except it was originally the UK :)
Parent and grand-parent are referring to :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
Look at texmacs
There's a slight learning curve - make sure to change the key bindings. I've been using it for about a year after using Lyx for nearly three and would never go back.