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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."
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. On the one hand, you have MS (anti-competitive, anti-freedom), and on the other, you have China (anti-freedom, police state). I guess which one is the 'friend' depends on one's POV.
Coming soon from MacDonald Software, the Enterprise Interoperability Evermore Integrated Office release (E-I-E-I-O).
I can't (yet) think of any reasons for them not to open up (properly) the format so that OO.org can read it.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Seeing as how both ODF and UOF is based upon open standards (based on Wikipedia), what advantages does UOF offer over ODF?
They should have called it the Uniform Format of Office. UFO sounds way better than UOF.
Seeing as how both ODF and UOF is based upon open standards (based on Wikipedia), what advantages does UOF offer over ODF?
Less jail time if your Tibet protest pamphlets are saved in UOF?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The AC is right. How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need? Since anything official (courts government, etc.) has to be in PDF these days why not just use Acrobat for all of it? Who cares if it's closed source?
How about native support for mkv video? That would be news. How about native 64 bit software? Let's really try somthing new, code a wordprocessor to actually use multithreading! Nah! let's just cook up a new extension for text files, and then fight about it.
This whole wordprocessor thing has gone from the from the sublime to the ridiculous.
probably a lot like how they're harmonizing with Tibet and Taiwan.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I hope they also try to ram UOF down ISO's throats. The ensuing chaos will require actual government to step in and impose a standard by fiat.
Or we could all just go back to using LaTeX. I'd be alright with that. Actually, I learned LaTeX after switching to odf, so I've always viewed LaTeX as an upgrade from odf.
The AC is right. How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
I for one welcome our dyslexic UFO overlords.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
but it is NaN times more expensive than OpenOffice.org!
ast I knew, they were working on a way to harmonize UOF with ODF. How is that going?
Well they have a new name, UFO: Unified File Object, which, if flies, will also offer security through obscurity in that its contents will be Unidentifiable, thus making Microsoft happy in the same breath. Microsoft of course wishes it to be called "Unidentified File Object" and thus mod it +5 Funny so that it doesn't get accepted.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
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!
\begin{comment}
\begin{quote}
This whole wordprocessor thing has gone from the from the sublime to the ridiculous.
\end{quote}
What's a `word processor'?
\end{comment}
So I take it the UOF standard will allow you to write anything as long as its not political, anti-social or anything about human rights? I wonder if it has its own version of Clippy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippy? "I see you are writing an article on human rights. Would you like to see a list of government agencies that are watching you?"
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.
1. Get a team of programmers and sponsor them with big chinese govt. money
2. Put them to work to get rid of Microsoft
3. Profit!!
I don't avoid MS Office or Windows because they're from Microsoft. I avoid them because they cost a lot and I don't really like them that much anyway. I also don't like the way that Microsoft doesn't give me the freedom to use them how I want to. Why should a format, OS and/or Office suite that originates from China be judged any differently?
I'm not a great fan of China or its policies, many of which I find quite abhorrent and I'll protest about them in my own way for what they are. China's a massive and very complext place, though. If UOF and EIOffice are actually beneficial and useful (neither of which I could vouch for because I haven't seen them), wouldn't it just make sense to encourage them on their individual merits?
Exceptions to this might be if you could show that the UOF specifications were developed by jailed political prisoners being unjustly forced to live in torture chambers and design document format specifications against their will, and perhaps you wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing if it's likely to continue happening. But if you ignored ideas simply because of where they came from rather than the merits of the ideas themselves, you'd be restricting yourself a lot and we probably wouldn't have many of the beneficial things we have today.
It's called "HTML" and everybody is already using it.
Well, I suspect it's something along the line of a food processor. You know the kind - you put your ingredients into it, push a button and the result is something you wouldn't recognize if you didn't know what just happened.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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.
You don't get to be in a position where you're the CEO/President of a company who's standard is "blessed" by the Chinese government without having very deep tendrils into the government itself (cough...corruption/nepotism...cough).
More often than not, there are personal and/or family relations between the regulators and the regulated in China that would land all the parties in jail in a developed country. Welcome to Chinese business 101.
LaTeX is great, and is very useful when writing papers or manuals, etc.
It sucks for throwing together little one-off projects though. A little FAQ sheet. A letter to someone. A notice for the door. That kind of stuff. Word or Publisher (even Powerpoint sometimes) are just the ticket for that sort of thing.
Word is also handy for doing labels and envelopes since it's mail-merge is so simple.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The AC is right. How many versions of wordprocessor extensions do we really need?
Three and half.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Because it looks awful.
Look, even SLASHDOT, home of the nerds, uses formatting .
The goal here isn't to reduce file sizes. Honestly -- for a one off project? The disk space is negligible. And even if you could use HTML-ized "plaintext" to convey formatting, suddenly it's not "faster" to author, especially for anybody who's not a psychotic tech fiend.
The goal here is to make approximately what you want, as quickly & easily as possible. Plaintext fails at "as fast as possible". LaTeX is harder than WYSIWYG editors for loose approximations at a small scale, and easier than WYSIWYG for tight approximations (especially where math is involved) at a large scale, with never-ending arguments over the exact boundary on those two axes.
Ha! We'll win this format war yet by giving them useless seemingly-good moderation points that do nothing to improve their karma!
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Because I don't know LaTeX, and don't have time to learn, especially for a one-off project. But even my grandmother knows Word. (Not making that up -- she also uses email, albeit very slowly.)
And because I can't recall ever needing the advanced features of LaTeX. I don't even use all of a WYSIWYG word processor's features -- when I use a word processor.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Because I need to format it. Trivial example: I want to print huge letters, one per page, so I can make a big sign to put in the window, for a one-night-only event (prank, actually).
Or because I'm writing up a resume. Like it or not, plain text looks unprofessional next to a proper resume, with contact info right-justified at the top, proper (graphically) bullet-pointed lists, and maybe even a photo.
So "faster" is a non-issue -- I can make a text file faster, and I do that for things like READMEs in software, but it won't do what I want for a resume, a big party sign, a "Lost dog -- Reward" sign, or any of the many other uses for desktop publishing.
And because even if I did this every day for the rest of my life, it would still use an insignificant amount of disk space -- even if I stored the XML unzipped, in a folder (which some apps can do).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What Microsoft could do is, start offering doses of opium free to the Chinese with purchases of Windows. Then, if the Chinese government tried to stop it, Microsoft could claim foul to our government, who would land troops and suppress the Chinese government enough to ensure that the opium was distributed so that people would turn to Microsoft for more opium.
This is my sig.
~/.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.
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.