OpenDocument Format

""We are glad to become part of OpenDoc Society," says Italo Vignoli, a member of The Document Foundation's steering committee, "Because we feel that the association's work of promoting interoperability between ODF implementations and sharing knowledge about best practices, fits together well with the mission of The Document Foundation to provide a full-featured Open Source productivity tool with strong ODF support. Interoperability is something that we - as a community - have to work on together and, with its fostering of events such as ODF plugfests and tools like Officeshots.org, OpenDoc Society has been a driving factor in this area"."

"Strasbourg, Sept 21, 2010 -- Today the European Parliament plenary adopted a report on completing the internal market for e-commerce prepared by Spanish rapporteur Pablo Arias Echeverría (EPP). The reports highlights the importance of an open document exchange format for electronic business interoperation and calls on the European Commission to take concrete steps to support its emergence and spread."

"File formats are the rules that define the meaning of all the sequences of bits that you can find inside a computer file. If the format of a file isn't really open, that is completely known and useable by everybody without paying fees or asking some permit, that file will surely readable without errors only with one or very few software programs and only until those programs exist. Therefore, their authors will be able to ask whatever price they want for every new version of their program(s), especially if citizens are trained in public schools to know (only) those same programs. "

"A study published by the Norwegian "Direktoratet for forvaltning og IKT" (Agency for public adminstration and ICT) comes to the result that OOXML is not suitable for being used by the Norwegian government. The study is available online in Norwegian. Amongst the reasons that are given are that the standard with its more than 6000 pages is not appropriate; it is not suitable for collaboration; and there is only one software that can implement it and produce the respective file format. Norway recommends pdf for electronic document exchange of documents that don't need to be edited and ODF (open document format) for all other documents."

"OdtPHP is an oriented object libary for PHP 5+. It allows you to generate automatically OpenOffice text documents from templates. You can use it directly within your PHP scripts (without OpenOffice)."

"In Tim's and my Lotusphere session AD111 we rendered data from an XPage into a ODT document. Once you get the hang of it and it is easy to implement export to text, spreadsheet or presentations. One nice aspect: no server side OpenOffice or Symphony code is needed. Here is how you do it"

"This is the first in a series of articles that will compare ODF and in particular the OpenOffice implementation and Microsoft Office and its various data formats with respect to various measures. This article will cover the efficiency of the .odt, .doc and .xml formats, with particular interest to native and compressible file sizes."

"This article introduces the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and ODF Toolkit and the methodology for including the toolkit in your IBM® WebSphere® Portal 6.1 environment. We also show how to create an ODF solution for your IBM Lotus® Symphony™-generated ODF documents for an integrated WebSphere Portal and IBM Lotus Quickr™ environment."

"I once asked a corporate IT person what his company's investment was in office software. He gave me the cost of their Microsoft Office licences - which was the wrong answer.... The company's real investment - their intellectual property - is in the millions of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, etc. they have created."

"This program (download) takes a Celtx file and creates an OpenDocument text file suitable for opening in OpenOffice.org version 3. The reason I wrote it is that Celtx, does not handle Unicode well, so people who write their scripts in languages like Russian or Japanese or Chinese can't get printouts. When Celtx gets updated to handle Unicode properly, this utility will no longer be needed."

" All that is now left to accomplish is to have the OpenDocument standards people realize that embedding the fonts into the document file is a good idea. Once that happens, we will actually have a portable editable document format."

"I spent the last week in the beautiful Italian city of Orvieto in Umbria, a little over 100 km north of Rome. The reason for that was that something called the ODF Plugfest was arranged by the dutch organization Opendoc Society. The Opendoc Society is interested in spreading the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and in interoperability between different applications using ODF. I was there as a representative for the KOffice community and also for my company KO GmbH that sells services around KOffice and OpenDocument. With me from the KOffice community was Jos van den Oever, also from KO, and Thomas Zander from Nokia."

"Orvieto last week hosted the second ODF Interoperability Workshop, an international event bringing together ODF implementers from all over the world. My talk "open standards and interoperability" opened the first session on day 1, just after Fabio Pistella - President of the Italian National Center for ICT in Public Administrations (CNIPA) - welcomed the international audience."

"When exchanging documents as attachments to e-mail between government institutions and users, from 1.1.2011 it will be obligatory to use the document formats PDF or ODF."