As the founder of a Mac User Group (KESMUG), I know that there are users of many different
office suites (MS Office, Abiword, Nisus, OpenOffice.org/NeoOffice) and systems (Mac/Linux/PC), I would be very interested to know what you all think of the Open Document Format (ODF)?
I know that ODF is a standard developed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) using XML to store and exchange data. Some 600 organizations worldwide, many big corporate names among them, assisted OASIS in developing ODF. It also
had a public test phase before final voting on the specification by OASIS members. ODF was voted as an International Standard by the ISO/IEC on May 2nd 2006.
Why do we need ODF?
Many governments around the world are switching to Linux OS and ODF. This is not about them saving money (though the benefits are huge) or putting Microsoft down. It is about the preservation of information. Each new version of MS Office changes the file format used. I read that Office XP cannot open Office 2000 files. Governments need to retain information for decades, even centuries. This is why MS has been asked for years to produce an Open file format that is accessible to anyone regardless of what system/software used. They were instructed to do so by the EU in 2004.
Instead MS chose to ignore its customers requests and produce its own xml format, MS Office Open XML. Now I have not read the license for this format but am given to understand that it is not Open, nor does it meet any of the specifications of the Standard. Nor is it interoperable with other non-MS office suites. Microsoft have produced the Office 2007 Format Compatibility Pack but it does not open ODF files, instead it converts them into Ms Office Open XML. It’s a stop gap until
whatever ends up in MS Office 2008.
What’s good about ODF?
If you change the file tag .odt (open document text) to .zip, you will see the following files at least;
* content.xml
* META-INF/manifest.xml
* meta.xml
* mimetype
* settings.xml
* styles.xml
Images and macros would be contained in additional folders. Thismakes it easy to recover data from files should it be necessary. ODF is used by many Office suites and the file size is a lot smaller than what MS Office produces. I have converted a few to ODF and some are only one third the size of their MS counterpart.
1. I am considering changing all files to ODF. What do you think?
2. Do you use ODF?
3. Have you had any problems with exchanging ODF documents?
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January 17, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Change only the documents you need to archive to ODF, and keep a copy as RTF. RTF has been the de-facto well documented interchange format for years, and import/export support for it for most programs is much better than ODF import/export. Documents that you are just using, use the native format of your word processor, since ODF is really just a prettied-up version of OpenOffice.org’s internal structure, so only OpenOffice.org can import it exactly. For instance, if you use AbiWord, keep any documents that aren’t archival in .abw (default) format, and save archival ones in .rtf and perhaps .odt.
Hope this helps!
–Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
January 17, 2007 at 4:08 pm
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January 17, 2007 at 9:15 pm
RTF is not really a good interchange format. First of all, it does not faithfully reproduce all of your formatting in a different application. I use AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, KOffice, WordPerfect, and Microsoft Office, so I know that an RTF file, once opened in a different application, is often vastly different from what you expected.
ODF is designed from the beginning for interchange between different office applications. AbiWord, last I checked, was said to be at least 60% compliant. KWord seems to be (for my uses, anyway) almost fully compliant—even better than OpenOffice.org—which makes it easy to exchange files from Windows to Linux and back.
If you have to exchange files with Microsoft Office, any of the above software can read and write .doc files fairly well. But RTF never even worked well exchanging between Word and WordPerfect on Windows. Why would someone expect it to be any better with a larger pool of software that it must be exchangeable with?
January 17, 2007 at 9:53 pm
@lnxwalt: RTF is no more or less faithful to the original format than ODF. What gets rendered to screen is largely a product of:
1) Font metrics, device resolutions, etc.
2) Differences in the layout/rendering system being used. KWord’s isn’t identical to OOo’s, etc.
3) How well the import filter is written/how well the import filter conforms to the file specification.
These 3 things don’t vary between semantically equivalent file formats, and the ODF word processing format largely describes a document’s semantics – where paragraphs are, what style is this text in, etc. It doesn’t say “put this text at position(x,y) on the screen”. If you want visual identical results across viewers, use a format designed for that sort of interchange, namely PDF.
RTF is no better or worse than ODF in this regard. It can faithfully represent everything that the Microsoft Word spec can, which is basically the same feature set as ODF. It also has an up-to-date free spec and free sample implementation complete with source code.
Finally, every new version of Microsoft Office does *not* change the file format it uses. The binary version used in the most recent Word is backwards-compatible to Word97, nearly 10 years old now. It’s true that their new XML format is quite a departure from their previous binary one, though. But then again, ODF is substantially different from SXW, and I don’t hear anybody complaining about that.
January 17, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Dom, I appreciate all that you developer guys have done with AbiWord, but *as a user*, I can tell you that you will regularly lose important features (such as columns, tables, paragraph alignment, and wrapping settings for inserted file objects such as images) if you exchange a file as RTF. Further, when someone sends you a word processing file, they will expect that what they saw is what you will see. Unfortunately, RTF does not do this.
Note that exchanging ODF (.odt) files with AbiWord still loses formating (as of version 2.4.6), but KWord (Linux) to or from OpenOffice.org 2.0+ (Windows or Linux) stays more or less the way the sender intended.
January 18, 2007 at 1:37 am
@lnxwalt – It’s not a problem inherent with RTF vs. OpenDocument as file formats. They both can represent the same data. The problem is largely one of developer will.
I know that different products have varying levels of support for various standards. And I’m glad that people are getting good results with ODF as an interchange format. But it’s not an issue of file format technical superiority.
But again, this isn’t a problem with RTF per-se, but people’s implementations of the RTF standard. OpenDocument is no different in this regard, except that some applications that were bad at speaking RTF are now good at speaking ODF. The consumers benefit, so who am I to complain?
Finally, word processing documents rarely look the same across computers. All someone needs is a slightly different set of fonts installed or a different viewing/editing program for a word to get shifted a little to the right, forcing text to reflow onto another page. It happens. If you don’t want that to happen, use a DTP program instead.
January 18, 2007 at 10:27 am
WOW! Thanks for all the feedback guys. Personally as a user of PC/Mac/Linux I much prefer now to use OpenOffice.org in Linux so will stick with ODF for most things. Though I do have some complex spreadsheets that I am cautious to move from .xls yet.
If anyone using MS asks me for a file I can always provide something in that format. Very interesting comments, thanks again.
September 28, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Thanks for your information
April 15, 2009 at 2:11 pm
This topic is quite trendy on the Internet right now. What do you pay attention to while choosing what to write ?