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I stand corrected. Those are great examples that you have given.
Virgil
Hi 
I think AOO and LO have different niche markets they are more suitable for. Oddly the niche for AOO is currently finding LO to be a better choice for them but this may settle down in a few years with people eventually settling for the one that really does fit them better. Of course with the rapid pace of LO's community development and all other development too we may find that LO does fit that niche better by then.
I think one of the main strengths of both projects is that the other one does exist and is easy to migrate to. Both are different enough that a calamity for one might be beneficial for the other. Both projects are able to focus on what they do best without having to worry about covering all options. Then remember there are loads of other projects such as Caligra/KOffice, Google-docs, Gnome Office and many others that have already settled into their respective niches but are still growing into other areas incrementally. Any or all could take over the areas dominated by AOO and LO at the moment.
"United we stand". Why let people push us into arguing between projects?
Regards from
Tom
Hi
Thanks for the boost in morale there!
Regards from
Tom
Hi
I just tried it myself and found that Odt and DocX were much more readable in a text editor than Rtf mostly because my text-editor recognises Xml and colour-codes the coding so i can ignore it more easily and focus on the wording.
While text-editors and more recent versions of MSO might be able to read MS's older formats they often render it badly or mess things up. A text-editor is the last relevant thing i would want to have to use to decypher an old document. The more modern formats, Odt and DocX do at least keep images intact in a separate folder inside the container format. Rtf turns images into mush.
HoooRahh for playing devil's advocate. I should have tested it myself ages ago (hmmm, i think i did actually but had forgotten which is just as bad). It has reaffirmed my thoughts but shown me there are cases where Rtfs might survive. (Such as ones that don't have pics)
Regards from
Tom
Hi
I just think it's hilarious that people claim the MS format is the best for interoperability with one breath and with the next they clamour for the entire company to upgrade all machines at the same time in order to be able to read each others documents properly!
Regards from
Tom
I don't understand the maddening aspect of this reaction. I suppose I don't have to.
When ODF was developed at OASIS, one of the design points was to be based on the functionality of OpenOffice 1.x as it was at the time, starting from an XML format that was developed for that product. It was explicitly ruled out of scope for the format to have counterparts of Microsoft Office document features.
When OOXML was developed, using the Open Packaging Conventions that were already used by Microsoft for a different project, a critical goal was to have fidelity-preserving, convertible features of legacy Microsoft Office documents. There is also a strict version that doesn't include so much of the legacy accommodation and has some better feature provisions going forward.
There you have it. ODF 1.0 then ODF 1.1 and now ODF 1.2. Also, OOXML versions 1 through 3 (so far), although ODF changed more from ODF 1.1 to ODF 1.2 (because of the addition of OpenFormula) than anything that happened to OOXML since the ISO OOXML version.
Neither of these are DocBook (an XML document format) or DITA or any other XML-carried document format. None of that is surprising in any technical way: XML is not a document format, it is a markup format for extending and customizing into any number of document models and schemas. XML by itself (unlike HTML, yet-another document format) doesn't establish any kind of document format whatsoever.
There was an ISO working group looking into the harmonization of document formats, especially with what could make better portability among OOXML-based and ODF-based software. A recent report on the subject is rather interesting. Look at <http://www.interoperability-center.com/en/dokumenten-iop-lab>. The final report on Document Profiling and a White Paper on Document Interoperability are listed in the "Publications" sidebar.
- Dennis
...
Indeed:
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49502>
[RTF: opening RTF file failed]
<https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=open&product=LibreOffice&content=RTF>
What I find maddening is that two document formats can be so similar, and yet remain so different. As Maxwell Smart would say, "missed by THAT much."
Virgil
I think you may be over-estimating the similarities. There are strong differences in the models and architectures of the two formats. And their goals were different. That they both use Zip and XML is a bit like saying my house and the railroad station both have copper plumbing.
While it is the case that there are many common features that users see and use, how they are reflected in the format is quite different and, in some cases, lossy under portability, even sometimes incommensurable. Despite that, there is high portability for a class of documents.
- Dennis
Anecdote #1: Regina and I just ran into an interesting one. Passwords use to protect fields and sheets and text documents don't convert between the OOXML and ODF formats. One reason is that the code in which the password is stored before it is converted to a digital hash is different. So even if the hash is moved, it can't be unlocked using the other format because the internal form of the password is different, and there's no way to adjust the hash for that. (In the case of encrypted documents, as opposed to protected documents, that doesn't work either, not the least being that there is no encryption as part of OOXML.) Ignoring the encrypted document case, there are ways that the products could come closer with regard to protection passwords.
Anecdote #2: Microsoft Word protects word documents by setting protection for the entire document and the user then selecting those parts of the document that are to have relaxed protection. Then a single password is used to lock in the arrangement. In ODF and OpenOffice, the selections to be protected are identified and they can be locked individually by passwords, with the rest of the document treated differently (or with yet another password). It is very had to take a protected document that was created in one model and convert it to a *protected* document in the other model. What is usually done is that each product ignores the protection settings from the other. This is a model incompatibility. That's a bigger deal, especially if it confounds something that is important to a very large number of users.
I feel that Virgil is right and still have hope that the 2 teams will join one day again. This enlarged team would be a very strong one against MS. There is a proverb in German, which goes approximately like this: Hope only dies at the very end!
This reminds me to video systems: Video2000 was said to be the best but died quickly. Sony BetaMax is only alive in the professional sector, but VDF (is this correct?), always called the worst video system in still alive...
Hi
I think you meant VHS but i really had to think about it. Interesting to hear the Betamax really might have outlived VHS afterall! People mostly moved to the various Dvd formats (including Bluray).
Regards from
Tom
Hi
+1
In my country there is a saying "a miss is as good as a mile". I do kinda agree with Dennis about the point that using xml in a zip-file format is a bit like using a red pen on paper. Just because 2 people use the same tools doesn't mean the result will be very similar.
Regards from
Tom
Hi
I'm completely lost now. I have a friend that is a VJ and he goes on about their different formats but i have no idea. He can just about get it when i go on about Pdf versus Odt versus DocX but that is pushing it. I'm currently struggling with trying to find good formats for still images. When i make a poster i can get it as a fairly tiny Png which doesn't get corrupted but other people often give me Jpegs or Pdfs with Jpeg compression that look really awful by the time they get to the website or get printed. For some reason a lot of people seem to think a good poster design is to make a nice jpeg image at say 4million pixels by 2 million or some ridiculously large size and then insert it into Word and then export to Pdf. So the image undergoes horrible mutilations and is ridiculously heavy by the time they send it and they can't understand because their original looked good in Paint or whichever stupid program they use.
I'm just really glad i don't have to deal with video because i'm sure people would carefully avoid using anything decent at any stage of the process and then expect me to present it beautifully.
Regards from
Tom
________________________________
From: rost52 <bugquestcontri@online.de>
To: Tom Davies <tomdavies04@yahoo.co.uk>
Cc: "users@global.libreoffice.org" <users@global.libreoffice.org>
Sent: Thursday, 29 November 2012, 11:47
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOfficeYes, I meant VHS - it just did not pop my mind. Thanks for your help. However, Blu-ray is only a storage format /technology not the video information. The video information is still in VHS or BetaMax. Thus the junk of VHS is still alive. All amateur video cameras work with VHS. (I hope that this is all correct!!!)
Hi
I think you meant VHS but i really had to think about it.
Interesting to hear the Betamax really might have outlived VHS
afterall! People mostly moved to the various Dvd formats
(including Bluray).
Regards from
Tom________________________________
From: rost52 <bugquestcontri@online.de>
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Sent: Thursday, 29 November 2012, 1:47
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOfficeThis reminds me to video systems: Video2000 was said to
be the best but died quickly. Sony BetaMax
is only alive in the professional sector, but VDF (is
this correct?), always called the worst video
system in still alive...
That may be
the hazard of having a truly open and standard
file format. It eliminates
a program's ability to survive.
This is far from truth.
Take a look at e-mail protocols: POP3 and IMAP. Do
we have only two e-mail
server apps and two e-mail client apps, one for
each? No. We have plenty of
servers and tons of clients.
Take a look at XMPP messaging protocol (this is
what Gmail and Facebook uses
for their chats). Again: plenty of servers, tons of
apps.
Take a look at BitTorrent file sharing protocol.
There are many clients for
every platform.
We have standards for HTML and CSS, yet there are
at least four competing web
browsers out there (although there was time when
market was monopolized).
This list can go on.
Standard file formats are pretty much irrelevant to
program's ability to
survive. It's number of features, availability on
certain OS, UI, branding,
number translations and other things which are
around standards that matters.
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