Summary: More OpenDocument Format (ODF) wins and an important reminder of people who try to harm it, sometimes while pretending to be "helping"

THE OTHER day we wrote about what Alex Brown had been doing in Wikipedia. For those who do not know Brown's role in Microsoft's OOXML fiasco, read [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]. Regarding Brown's edits (as we showed them a few days ago), one reader wrote privately to say, "I just wanted to let you know what Alex Brown appears to have done from those wiki edits (as far as I can go on the first page). All the criticism is magically gone. "whoops"."

Right now he makes minor edits to ODF's article, which is not as bad as the malicious edits from hAl, who got banned for his obvious warping of the ODF article, making it an ODF-hostile article.

But let's concentrate on the positives, not the negatives from Microsoft and its known cronies.

The OpenDocument Web site introduces readers to two tools, Office-O-Tron and ODFPy, which Bart Hanssens describes as follows:

Office-o-tron is an online validator for office documents. It understands ODF (1.0, 1.1 and draft 1.2) and OOXML ("Transitional").

 

Odfpy aims to be a complete API for OpenDocument in Python, essentially an abstraction layer just above the XML format. The main focus is to prevent the programmer from creating invalid documents.

Here is another one about Open Search Server:

Open Search Server is an open source search engine and comes with a suite of full text search algorithms. ODF is one of the supported formats.

There is a new article about this in Linux Magazine (also in German):

Open Search Server 1.1 with Synonym and ODF Support

[...]

The first stable release of the Open Search Server Java software now includes a Web and file crawler and uploaded documents can be searched. The server can handle MS Word and Powerpoint, Open Document Format (ODF), HTML, XML and PDF files.

From one of the European Union's Web sites we gather that Norway is indeed very serious about ODF.

On 25 September 2009 the Norwegian Government adopted a new regulation on mandatory IT standards applicable to the entire public sector. As of 1 January 2010 open document standards will become mandatory for all public websites.

As the Minister of Government Administration and Reform, Heidi Grande Røys, stated, the new regulation ensures equal accessibility to the content of all public and communal websites. Users of any municipality or state will be able to visit the websites and read the documents regardless the type of software and computer equipment they use. It is a democratic right for all citizens to have equal access to public information and online services.

Some parts of the United States may be equally interested in ODF. Here is a reminder about the state of New York.

IBM's Rob Weir gathers questions for the "State of ODF" panel, which he will moderate. Some people lend their voices to Weir and Dennis Hamilton continues his good work in this area. Bart Hanssens is also a major contributor, as opposed to those who are only pretending. They know who they are.

Weir and OASIS take ODF a step further into 1.2 while Weir and Hanssens are highlighting this new tool for verification of ODF signatures.

Via this page you can test the eID Applet Signature functionality. This test will demo the creation and verification of ODF signatures. ODF signatures are also supported by OpenOffice.org version 3.1.

KOffice 2 adds a mission statement placeholder to its Wiki while in Wikipedia someone removes the sentence: "The OpenDocument Foundation is not related to any entity doing standardisation work for the Open Document Format." This is later readded and removed again. Test of patience?

"Ask Google Translate team to support ODF," says OpenOffice.org and Weir speaks of the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC again. Microsoft and its cronies still try to ruin ODF from the inside or grab control of it. Clear evidence shows this repeatedly. ⬆