Plan-B for Software Documentation

Michael Brauer clarifies the status of OpenOffice.org’s work on MS-OOXML (aka ECMA-376).

He says that OpenOffice.org does work on supporting the format with input and output filters. this means you will be able to open a document from MS Office 2007 and to save it for Office 2007 users. Office 2007 is currently the only application that supports the new format our of the box. Older MS Office versions can be upgraded.

Michael reports that the current status is reading text from OOXML documents and that there is still a lot of work to do to reach satisfactory compliance. However, he remarks that as the format is now looked at by the International Standard Organization (ISO) for further standardization and that there are many complains from interested parties about incomplete definitions and contradictions of other standards. So he expects the format to evolve and undergo changes.

Michael also points out that OpenOffice.org will fully continue to support ODF (ISO 26300) as it’s default document format.

I’m curious if anybody of my readers can point me to non Microsoft OO-XML implementations?

I stumbled today over Linspire’s press release with this rather controversial paragraph.

The Open XML format is an open standard file format for office applications that can be freely implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. The Open XML format was standardized by Ecma International on December 7, 2006 and is also being implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. It is now under consideration for ratification by ISO/IEC JTC1. Open XML is the default format for the recently released Microsoft Office 2007. The Open XML format is also available through free updates to past Microsoft Office versions.

It claims that OOXML is open and can be implemented by anybody. However there is a raging discussion in the ISO standardization community and the open source community at large, that MS-OOXML is neither open nor worthy a standard, due to various contradictions and secretive parts.

I wonder if I’m just misinformed, or if there are more than some beta attempts from Novel, that so far are limited and buggy.

The Linux distributer TurboLinux has announced it will participate in the project to convert ODF files into MS Office 2007 compatible versions. TurboLinux will offer its expertise in Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese for converting documents.

The ODF converter is a Microsoft sponsored open source project that wants to bridge the interoperability gap between the new ISO standard format ODF and the proprietary world of MS Office. Its development is behind the abilities of Sun’s MS Office plug-in, only supporting text documents at this time. However it supports Office 2007.

Sun Microsystems released a plug-in that allows MS Office to work with ODF (or ISO 26300) files. The plug-in supports text-documents, spreadsheets and presentations, corresponding to MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Powerpoint. The plug-in works with MS Office versions 2000, XP and 2003. It can be downloaded from Sun for free.

Why does it not support MS Office 2007? Malte Timmermann gives the answer and many more around the new ODF plug-in for MS Office.

The campaign for MS-OOXML as ISO standard has been pushed forward by Microsoft for a while. Now the opposition does collect signatures to say No to MS-OOXML’s adoption as an ISO standard.

The critics do not want two standards and they do not want standards that have no reference implementation, do not make use of other ISO standards or do not fully describe what actually is the standard. The later point preventing anybody from complying

While other states’ attempts to safeguard their documents by using open standards seem to have stalled for now, New York is the next one to try. Assembly woman RoAnn M. Destito (Democrat), proposes the state study how government documents are created, shared, and archived and how these documents can be used in a way that “encourages appropriate government control, access, choice, interoperability, and vendor neutrality,” in Bill A08961.

This means more consideration of open standards like ODF and ISO 26300, to avoid perfectly preserved digital garbage that can’t be read because the format is not documented and the sole keeper of the application creating it went out of business.

Computerworld writes abut the defeat of bills pro ODF in six states. The proposed legislation would have in one way or another mandated that state agencies in California, Florida, Texas,
Oregon, Connecticut, and Minnesota, need to use open standards for office documents. The only currently accepted open standard that is implemented by more than one vendor is ODF/ISO 26300.

However, lobbying by Microsoft kept legislators from demanding that electronic office documents are stored in non proprietary formats, so they can be accessed in many years to come. Interestingly, most legislative comments do not doubt that this is a worthy goal. However they do feel used by either side of the debate and their lobbying interests. So they squashed most bills without a vote. I guess the companies gathered in the ODF Alliance lost a battle, but they don’t declare the war over.

As an increasing number of companies and institutions migrate to Linux and OpenOffice.org, interoperability becomes more and more important. The world is still geared towards Microsoft’s document formats and that poses barriers to migration, one of which is fonts and their influence on how documents print and break into pages.

The leading Linux distributions in the enterprise space, Red Hat and SuSE delivered some new fonts that are metrically identical to the widely used Microsoft fonts. What does this mean for you? You can receive an MS Office document and use the equivalent font and print it w/o fear of it breaking into a different number of pages. It also means you do not need to update the table of content because of re-pagination. Off course the same is true in the opposite direction ODF –> MS Office document.

Use Plan-B for OpenOffice.org to learn more about how to configure Writer for optimal MS document compatibility.

Yoon Kit blogs over at Open Malaysia about the physical size of the Microsoft OOXML spec presented to the International and national standardization boards.

You got to see the pictures of the 6039 pages in context. They are really eye popping.

Yoon also argues that this is probably by far the largest spec reviews in such short time. He puts his weight behind the request of various national organization bodies at the International Standardization Organization (ISO) to not fast track this mammoth of a standard specification. But these requests were ignored. This post is a must read!

Henry Neufeld, offers on his blog an OpenOffice.org (OOo) template for publishing a 6×9 booklet. Henry writes Bible related texts and publishes them as booklets. He shares his publishing template in ODF format with the world.

Henry’s OOo Writer template contains Title pages, dedication, acknowledgments and table of content as well as a list of chapters. The preface has roman numerical page numbers and the chapters show a title page as well as content pages with page numbers. All pages are sized for a 6 x 9 inch format.

With a little editing of the publisher information and the ISBN reference you can use it to publish your own texts. What are you going to write about?