Australian Govt Re-Kindles Office File Format War

An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Government's peak IT strategy group has issued a cautious updated appraisal of currently available office productivity suite file formats, in what appears to be an attempt to more fully explain its thinking about the merits of open standards such as OpenDocument versus more proprietary file formats promulgated by vendors like Microsoft."

Comments

Re:What about ODF?

[Bert64]

Yes change tracking is most definitely better served by revision control systems... Many organisations have had the change tracking systems in programs like word come to bite them in the ass pretty badly as comments they thought had been removed were still visible...

What's really stopping ODF tho, is MS... They technically support it, but their support is of an older version, is generally poor and they have made bad faith moves by exploiting loopholes in the spec to intentionally create incompatibilities.

Re:Vendor Lock-in

[crafty.munchkin]

Regardless of vendor lock-in, they're missing a crucial element - the employees of the Australian Public Service are terrible and impossible to retrain.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[Zarhan]

What's unfriendly about the following command?

\cite{some_book}

The fact that if I typo it to \cite{some_booky} it doesn't compile. And unless I rigorously recompile after every edit, I might not even catch that. Worse if the brace is missing.

What's unfriendly about the following entry?

It's in a separate file, for starters.

Also, you need to run Latex *twice* to get it working properly (the first time generates the .aux and then you can do it again). Oh right, creating a makefile is apparently easy for everyone.

And like I said, if you forget a comma at the end of the line, it doesn't work.

Oh, I guess I could just use readily-made citations that I can copypaste in from ieeexplore and the like? Well, guess what, the readily available bibtex exports are crap. For example, the bibtex containing all RFC:s (http://tm.uka.de/~bless/bibrfcindex.html) have all sorts of stuff in them that shouldn't be included (including standardization status and what RFC's it obsoletes). When I wrote my latest paper to Elsevier that included lots of RFC references, I basically had to run that .bib through a bunch of perl scripts with lots of regexps to get rid of all the cruft. Same has happened with most other readily made citations. At least the Word's XML has enough of the damn fields that you can pick'n'choose what to include in the reference. With bibtex, I have basically resorted to turning everything into @MISC.

So easy....not.

Only problem I have with Word's citation mechanism is that there isn't an easy way to get citations directly that format, but I have been using Bibutils (from http://sourceforge.net/p/bibutils/home/Bibutils/ ) to get back'n'forth between various formats.

I'll give Latex that it produces the most neatest documents there are, but to get that far you end up fighting all sorts of indicate details far too much. Don't even get started on how to create a new document class - if your text doesn't quite work with any of the provided classes and you'd like to create your own styles, good luck.

Submitter here

[wirelessduck]

The fact is that there are functions in the Microsoft formats that do not translate into the ODF formats. To the extent that these exist, and they are used by some subset of users, ODF does not provide full interoperability. We have also seen that other vendors develop support for OOXML over time.

I don't buy the reasons from John Sheridan for leaning towards OOXML. His main argument for going with OOXML over ODF appears to be that "ODF doesn't have 100% compatibility with legacy file formats". If they're going with Microsoft Office, can someone explain which features are not supported in ODF but are supported with OOXML? I find it hard to believe that a large percentage of people will use these "features" that don't exist in ODF.

And, without seekng to defend any vendors, I note that OOXML is an open standard recognised by ISO and IEC as ISO/IEC 29500.

Perhaps someone should enlighten him on the "committe stacking" and "bribery" allergations surrounding the OOXML standardisation process with ISO.

Any degree of lock in must be measured against the costs of changing, particularly if the change cannot be complete and two (or more) systems/applications need to be maintained.

Why would you need to maintain two systems? If you choose ODF, you can still use Microsoft Office. The only lock-in here would come from choosing OOXML.

Over time, it is possible, and IMHO likely, that other vendors will also be able to support OOXML – transitional or strict. We see this in the upgrading of OSS suites to handle newer formats (.docx over .doc for example).

Let me know when there's 100% compatibility on OOXML between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice. Also, transitional OOXML is the one that ISO rejected/deprecated for containing the "features" from legacy Microsoft file formats. I could also make the same claim here about Office 12 supposedly getting support for ODF1.2 (better late than never eh?), which would make ODF more widely supported than OOXML if it isn't already.

And from another commenter on TFA:

Right now I guess the two best reasons for OOXML are:
1) ISO 29500 Transitional has the best chance of faithfully representing all the legacy Office 97-2003 documents that are out there.
2) Microsoft Office has the larger install base by a country mile, giving it greater familiarity with users. This currently implies OOXML.

Not sure how the install base of Microsoft Office relates to requiring OOXML, since Microsoft Office supports ODF and OOXML.

If you want to make your voice heard on this issue, AIGMO are accepting comments on their blog posts here and here. Please note that this policy is for internal documents only. As John said in his comment on TFA, documents provided online for the general public to access are normally posted in both PDF and RTF formats and often HTML as well.

Re:TFA: Nobody fired for buying IBM

[TheRaven64]

Subscripts and superscripts in TeX work fine in math mode. _{this is subscript} and ^{this is superscript}. For chemistry, you probably want to be typesetting all chemical formulae in math mode, e.g.

Poor old Joe, he's dead and gone\\
His face you'll see no more\\
For what he thought was $H_2O$\\
Was $H_2SO_4$.