Slashdot Mirror
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."
How about the merit of even being able to re-evaluate their choice of file format because they aren't being locked in by their vendor?
I find it interesting that the author of the article states that he'd "... love to see some competition for Microsoft Office arise and challenge Redmond's dominance." yet recommends that the Australian Government "... would be silly to choose any other standard than one supported strongly by Microsoft." How does he expect the competition to occur if every government user (which is a MASSIVE userbase in Australia) doesn't have the option of using alternatives?
I'm finding the argument about:
"... licensing costs - which are not a factor with open source suites such as OpenOffice.org - are only 'a small proportion of overall ICT expenditure'. Any software change is likely to involve significant cost in installation, training and maintenance"
a little confusing considering the statement that several departments were:
"... signalled their intention to eventually migrate to Office 2010 as part of their next upgrade."
As a teacher in an Australian school currently being switched to 2010, I'd say that using Microsoft Office 2010 would involve a HIGHER retraining cost than LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
And I still can't understand why the government didn't decide "Microsoft Office 2010 is the preferred Office Suite AT PRESENT, but files must be saved in OpenDocument Formats."
I would like to know where do you find any word processor, such as Microsoft Word or even Libre Office Writer, to be superior to LaTeX in any aspect. It obviously isn't on the support for math notation, and it isn't on reference management, on colaborative work, on revision control, or on system requirements. It is also not in productivity, both by "advanced" users and specially in newbies.
The only aspect where I see that word processors may appear to be superior is in table formatting and in managing figures. Yet, that apparent superiority doesn't go beyond the discovery that pictures can be dragged and dropped to a document. Once the user is forced to format those objects then all hell breaks loose.
So, exactly where do you see word processors as being always superior to writing LaTeX documents through a text editor?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Well, normal people can use a word processor ?
Come on, surely you can see the problem.
The problem with this sort of appraisal is, that it originates from people with little to zero competence in software design and programming. The evaluation of the competing standards, ODF vs. OpenXML, fails to take future development of IT systems into account.
The problem with Microsoft OpenXML is, that it depends heavily on Windows and on the way today's computer architectures work. Those architectures, especially Windows, are outdated from a software design point of view (even more consistent/elegant designs such as Unix or OS400 are partly outdated in their design or implementation).
The reason why we really need open standards is, that we MUST ensure, that the development of new technologies is not handicapped by dependencies of standards on outdated designs. Today's systems, especially the Windows platform, are prone to security leaks as well as all sorts of malfunctions.
With state-of-the-art design and implementation, it is possible to build computer systems that are orders of magnitude more secure and reliable - but those newer technologies will never find their way to customers, if broken standards like OpenXML make it impossible to port any application software to such new computer architectures.
So, in the end, the question is whether you plan to use Windows+Office+Symantec antivirus the next 200 years, running daily updates, breaking 500 of your 3000 desktop computers twice a year, and employing a 50-people software-repair shop to keep that PC stuff running; or whether you'd rather like to keep the door open for something new, that avoids 99% of the problems that today's mainstream systems have.
If the user really needs formatting, they can always use something like (La)TeX, and if they need something more than that, they can use Scribus or InDesign.
LaTex is awesome. It really and truly is. The trouble is that you're absolutely never going to get typical office workers to even read things like this, let along actually use what you're recommending.
Its output is pretty but the language is a complete mess. Packages are designed without much forethought and are sometimes incompatible with each other. It is really difficult to achieve fine control over the formatting unless you are a latex guru. Error messages are incomprehensible. Basic things like the occasional overlong lines are hard to fix. It's definitely not awesome, at best it's a necessary evil if you want high-quality papers.
Lyx makes latex a bit more bearable, but if you want fine control you need to go down to the latex level anyway.
I think the thing that you're missing is that most normal people can't do these things in Word either. Let's take the cross referencing example. I recently proofread a masters dissertation for a friend who is not a native speaker. She was using Word, and used Word in her day job. Yet all of the references to figures were done by explicitly typing 'See Figure 12'. When I suggested that she might want to add a figure, she said that she didn't want to because she'd have to renumber everything. I was pretty shocked by this, since that's exactly the sort of thing that computers are supposed to do - the boring and repetitive tasks. Surely, I said, Word can do this? Yes, it can, and actually Word's cross-referencing tool is more powerful than LaTeX's one (which is pretty primitive, although there are a few packages that improve it).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They can do some of it, but when the WP decides that the figure goes on the next page, they won't be able to find out how to tell it not to. When they want a paragraph starting on the next page, not split over two, they'll use returns to add blank lines. When the font used gets changed, they'll be adding another font tag inside a now unused font tag. When they need a contents or index, they'll either type it all out by hand or try the wizard and get an answer they don't like (and therefore go and make one by hand again) because how to get it to do what they WANTED, not what they were given, is not possible for them.
In fact, in all the ways they know how to use Word, they know how to use Tex. And in all the ways they don't know how to use Tex, they don't know how to use Word.
For the opposite case, look at IDEs. In only 20 years ...
20 years ago I was using Borland C. Nothing since has ever touched the beautiful integration of editing, compiling and debugging that BC had. The write-compile-test cycle was breathtakingly fast and convenient.
I'm not saying we haven't made progress. The editor I use now creams it, and I'm not looking to go back. But from a pure IDE standpoint, no, things pretty much peaked in the early to mid '90s.
The last time I used Microsoft Word 2007 to input equations was a couple of months ago, and although it is able to represent simple equations, like the ones involving index notation, fractions and other basic notation elements, the only way it was possible to enumerate them was if the user relied on a couple of obscure nasty hacks which fail to be even adequate.
And even then, equations in Microsoft Word 2007 are still represented in a crude and unpretty way when compared to the much simpler and straight-forward TeX way of doing things.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
It really depends on what's your definition of "friendly". For example, I see BibTeX as the friendliest bibliography system there is, mainly due to the fact that when you use it you don't even need to be aware you are using it. You just pick your bibliography file and simply reference what you wish to reference. What's unfriendly about the following command?
\cite{some_book}
Managing a BibTeX bibliography is also quite simple and straight-forward. A user only needs to open a text file with a text editor and add an entry to a book. What's unfriendly about the following entry?
@Book{some_book,
AUTHOR = {The author's name},
TITLE = {the title of the book},
PUBLISHER = {The publisher's name},
YEAR = {some year},
isbn = {a ISBN reference},
}
If we compare using BibTeX with the god-awful way Microsoft Word handles bibliographies we lose any reason to claim that word processors are somehow better at its job than LaTeX. So, why do some people keep parrotting that word processors such as Microsoft Word are somehow better at producing documents than LaTeX? This sort of claim simply goes against reality.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.