Re: When will Open Document format be supported?

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005, Karjala wrote:

> Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2005 11:30:29 +0300
> From: Karjala <karjala_lists@karjala.org>
> To: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Subject: When will Open Document format be supported?
>
>
> When will Abiword support the OpenDocument format?

Thanks to INdT and Nokia Abiword already has quite good import.
Export is still a work in progress.

> Isn't that necessary for people to be able to send complex documents
> (written in Abiword) to others and expect from them to be able to read them?

OpenOffice.org has far more resources than Abiword and our format is far
simpler but unfortunately there is no sign of anyone adding Abiword
support to OpenOffice.org. Instead the burden is all on the Abiword
developers. (Last time I looked creating an XSLT based importer would
have required the Java subsystems which discouraged me from looking into
it futher. KOffice also has the option to create XSLT based filters so
it might still be worth exploring.)

> Because right now I can send in Abiword format (which noone can be
> expected to have),

> rtf (which displays differently in different word processors)
> and doc (which we can't be certain that will look the same in M$ Word)

In Abiword RTF and DOC are effectively the same. Most formats will
display different in other word processors and even Microsoft cannot get
their own documents to display reliably in different versions of their own
software so frankly it is a miracle anyone else manages to do as well as
they do.

It is more complicated than you think. If you want things to look exactly
the same the most dependable thing is PDF, in fact it is probably the only
dependable thing I'm not convinced even OpenDocument could be as good as
PDF at making sure things look the same in different versions but as
Abiword and KOffice improve perhaps fidelity if document presentation will
be better than I expect.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

> So... opendocument is needed.
>
>
>
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Received on Sun Oct 16 14:08:08 2005