

The cost of ODF and OOXML - biehl
http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_cost_of_ODF_and_OOXML.html

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fpp
To avoid the pitfalls mentioned in the article, most places I know have
stopped sending MS Word or ODFs but instead use PDFs.

Converting documents from Word to ODF or vice-versa is full of issues as no
conversion here is 1-to-1 (same applies for conversions of e.g. old MS Word
formats to newer ones - don't know for various ODF implementations).

If you don't collaborate on the document writing, IMHO pdf is the best
representation for both of the formats and all those offices that require ODFs
instead of MS Word do accept pdf files as well.

Creating a pdf from a MS Word / ODF file is a matter of seconds to 1-2 minutes
for very large documents.

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Edootjuh
This might be obvious, but PDF isn't usually reflowable (and if it is, it's
not very easy to do so), which makes for a painful reading experience on a
smallish widescreen monitor, and isn't editable easily.

I usually just decide between plain-text, HTML, Google Docs and LaTeX/PDF,
going up the ladder as the complexity of the document requires, or if it needs
to be editable.

I hate it when I'm e-mailed a Word document that could easily have been plain
text, in which case it would be searchable and more easily found when looking
through e-mails manually.

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suprgeek
When you do not have any facts to back-up a preposterous claim, you just make
up stuff as you go along. This is (somewhat predictable)from Microsoft after
their initial efforts to break the standard.

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kierank
Glyn Moody just makes up facts to fit his own agenda and then when you point
them out to him he just says you're missing the overall point. He creates more
FUD than the organisations he complains about.

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leke
So this is what MS presented to the UK government and the UK government didn't
hear a response from an open source representative?

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jpkeisala
I have always wondered why Open Document standard would not be based around
HTML instead of inventing new XML schema? Can someone who has more insight on
ODF/OOXML tell me why HTML is not suitable for office document format?

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willvarfar
Really, what we need to adopt en-mass is Tex.

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AndrewDucker
All sorts of things Tex doesn't handle.

Embedded editable files, for instance.

Or markup for tracking changes.

Tex might make a good starting point for building a system that _did_ do all
of that, but nobody seems to be working on that.

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politician
> Or markup for tracking changes.

I've often wondered why Microsoft chose to embed a weak implementation of
version control into their mutable document format instead of doing something
like passing around a signed chain of immutable documents.

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MichaelGG
The people that made change tracking probably wanted the feature to work and
be usable, rather than create another crypto product and have no one figure it
out.

Also, if you don't trust the other parties, you can use the compare feature an
get a diff of the documents. Keeping your own copy is a easy, simple, way to
get a correct view of changes to a document.

~~~
politician
Right, so, "signed" in the same sense that a chain of git commits are signed.
In other words, resiliency not trust, and full history instead of whatever
Track Changes provides.

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MichaelGG
Sure, and Microsoft provides document signing/rights management, as well, if
you can get the supporting infrastructure. Office apps also have built in
change revision history. Track Changes is sorta orthogonal here, I think.

