07.27.09
3rd International ODF User Workshop, ODFDOM Tutorials, and More
Summary: Little bits of ODF news
FOR THOSE who wonder what’s new in Open Document Format (ODF), a new workshop is being organised for users and there is also this new tutorial for ODFDOM. Those who are not familiar with ODFDOM probably ought to notice a short description of it:
The ODFDOM Toolkit API is a framework written in Java and designed to provide an easy common way to create, access and manipulate OpenDocument format (ODF) files, without requiring detailed knowledge of the ODF specification.
David Weinberger has a go at explaining ODF.
[E]ven if ODF were to become the dominant document standard, Microsoft could support it robustly, although that might mean that some of Word’s formatting niceties wouldn’t make the transition. Would business be ok with that? For creators, probably yes; it’d be good to be relieved of the expectation that you will be a document designer. For readers, no. We’ll continue to want highly formatted documents. But, then ODF + formatting specifications can produce quite respectably formatted docs, and that capability will only get better.
ODF is not about supporting Microsoft Word, so this is not relevant. Word can support ODF, but ODF need not supporting any specific office suite. At present, Microsoft Office does not support ODF properly [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. █
