OASIS Standard ODF 1.2 Approved

Dennis_E_Hamilton · October 1, 2011, 1:18am

The OASIS ODF 1.2 Committee Specification 01 has been successfully advanced to an OASIS Standard, <http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/201109/msg00010.html>.

The final ballot results for approval of OASIS Standard ODF 1.2 is at <http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ballot.php?id=2115>.

Rob Weir has a nice summary on his blog, <http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/09/odf12-approved.html>. He lists the names of the contributors of 1.2 from the specification. Some of those names will be familiar here.

- Dennis

soumalya_ray · October 1, 2011, 3:23am

thanks for sharing.

Pedro_Lino · October 1, 2011, 9:40am

Congratulations to all.

I believe that a solid open file format is extremely important.

Am I correct to assume that ODF 1.2 is backward compatible? I.e. an old
application will still be able to open a ODF 1.2 document?

Dennis, one curiosity since you were one of the editors: I assume you didn't
use LO Writer to compose the 1217 page document. Which program did you use?
Scribus?

Tom_Davies · October 1, 2011, 9:54am

Hi
Good work there :) Thanks for clarifying a few things for us there.
Regards from
Tom

Tom_Davies · October 1, 2011, 11:56am

Hi
All releases of LibreOffice have used the 1.2 (Extended) by default. I think OpenOffice was using it for quite a long time before that too. I think the only program that still uses the older 1.1 or 1.0 formats is MS Office 2010. I think Google-docs, KOffice, Calligra, AbiWord & Gnumeric (together those 2 form Gnome Office) and the IBM's Lotus Symphony (or whatever it's called) all have been using 1.2 for a few years.

In LibreOffice you can confirm by clicking on
Tools - Options - "+ Load/Save" - General
about half-way down there is a drop-down showing "1.2 (Extended)". I usually change this to the older 1.0/1.1 in order to be able to send stuff to MS Office users more easily.

If you do have an older program then install any version of LibreOffice instead! Lol
Regards from
Tom

Dag_Wieers · October 1, 2011, 12:05pm

Thanks for making this clear to an ODF novice like me

I was wondering what standard I would use for my project and settled for ODF v1.1 (given that nearly everywhere, OASIS website and Wikipedia) refered to v1.2 as a draft.

Is there an overview of the changes to the standard between v1.1 and v1.2 ?

It might be possible to have both an odt11 and odt12 backend with odt12 inheriting the bulk of odt11 and implementing just the differences.

Thanks in advance,

Pedro_Lino · October 1, 2011, 12:15pm

Tom wrote:

If you do have an older program then install any version of LibreOffice
instead! Lol

Hi Tom

That was exactly my point. I hope that is not necessary.

If I'm sending a document to someone with an old machine running OpenOffice
1.0 (or whatever worked with ODF 1.0) I hope that I can send him an ODF 1.2
file and he still will be able to open it (even if he looses some format)

cornouws · October 1, 2011, 1:18pm

Dennis E. Hamilton wrote (01-10-11 03:17)

The OASIS ODF 1.2 Committee Specification 01 has been successfully
advanced to an OASIS
Standard,<http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/201109/msg00010.html>.

Thanks for and congratulations with this good news!

cornouws · October 1, 2011, 1:29pm

Pedro wrote (01-10-11 11:39)

Am I correct to assume that ODF 1.2 is backward compatible? I.e. an old
application will still be able to open a ODF 1.2 document?

Yes. Of course, some content (from the new standard) may be wrong.

Pedro_Lino · October 1, 2011, 1:34pm

Cor Nouws wrote:

Pedro wrote (01-10-11 11:39)

Am I correct to assume that ODF 1.2 is backward compatible? I.e. an old
application will still be able to open a ODF 1.2 document?

Yes. Of course, some content (from the new standard) may be wrong.

Excellent! More Kudos to all that were involved!

Now the next task is to convince Microsoft to use ODF 1.2 as an
import/export option

NoOp · October 1, 2011, 5:23pm

Congratulations to all.

I believe that a solid open file format is extremely important.

Am I correct to assume that ODF 1.2 is backward compatible? I.e. an old
application will still be able to open a ODF 1.2 document?

Dennis, one curiosity since you were one of the editors: I assume you didn't
use LO Writer to compose the 1217 page document. Which program did you use?
Scribus?

...

From the pdf file properties I've looked at, it looks like a mix between

StarOffice 9, OpenOffice.org 3.2/3.3.

Dennis_E_Hamilton · October 1, 2011, 5:36pm

Whether a down-level software version will even accept an ODF 1.2 document as if it is a down-level document and do the best it can is not something the ODF specifications address. It depends on the down-level product.

It probably works with OpenOffice.org versions, but maybe not with other lineages.

For example, the Microsoft Office ODF 1.1 support tends to be strict and will consider some ODF 1.2 documents as possibly-corrupted, although when asked to attempt to correct the document, it succeeds.

There are some uses of new features (such as digital signatures) that fail in amazing ways between implementations, even when they are all identified as 1.2 products.

In these edge situations, usually the only assured-to-be-successful consumer is a version of the same product that produced the document. There is work to do in that area. It may take a year or two for ODF 1.2 support to settle down and the level of interoperability to be raised across the board.

Dennis_E_Hamilton · October 1, 2011, 5:36pm

Q: "Am I correct to assume that ODF 1.2 is backward compatible? I.e. an old
application will still be able to open a ODF 1.2 document?"

Dennis_E_Hamilton · October 1, 2011, 5:36pm

Well, many products have been producing documents identified as ODF 1.2 for some time. There are changes that came in during 2010 that, as far as I can tell, are not consistently handled yet. And the OpenFormula specification, a major part of ODF 1.2, will take some time to be fully implemented. (My eye is on Gnumeric for moving the goal posts on that one.)

There will doubtless be far more attention to ODF 1.2 conformance and interoperability, in detail, now that ODF 1.2 is considered stable and especially as it works its way toward ratification as an ISO/IEC International Standard next year.

Some regrettable small things in ODF 1.2 are also showing up and I look forward to plugfests and the work of the ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC to help sort those out and find workarounds until there can be ODF 1.2 Errata or remedy in ODF 1.3.

There is no official "ODF 1.2 (extended)" only "ODF 1.2" if interoperability is desired. "(extended)" is a private matter and it might not be the same between products and even different releases of the same product. Whatever "(extended)" means, it depends on the individual-product implementers to say.

I agree that, in terms of current releases that might have more attention to ODF 1.2 provisions, LibreOffice is a good choice, depending on what additional ODF 1.2 support is important and being provided. I don't think that is a determining factor in much I've seen so far, though.

- Dennis

Dennis_E_Hamilton · October 1, 2011, 5:36pm

"Is there an overview of the changes to the standard between v1.1 and v1.2 ?

"It might be possible to have both an odt11 and odt12 backend with odt12
inheriting the bulk of odt11 and implementing just the differences."

There are some Appendices in Part 1 and Part 3 that describe changes since previous versions. I don't know that they are complete and I don't know if they indicate what might be breaking changes.

For AsciiDoc and any emitter, it would be great if the software indicated the smallest version of ODF that was actually required to correctly consume a document. I know that is hard. One way to soften the blow is to not use a different ODF 1.2 provision when only the ODF 1.1 form is needed to accomplish a feature. In many cases, ODF 1.2 defaults are the same as the only ODF 1.1 capability, and it is ODF 1.2-unique ways of only getting that default behavior that will make an unnecessary incompatibility in a document.

- Dennis

OT: Dag, have you looked at DITA, which also is apparently doing multiple-targeting?

Dennis_E_Hamilton · October 1, 2011, 5:36pm

A while back, Microsoft offered a warranty with regard to ODF 1.2 support. I believe it is contingent on ISO standardization occurring. There is also an announcement that Microsoft would provide information on its ODF 1.2 support on the occasion of a Plugfest in Brussels this coming April. That's the extent of the details I've seen.

- Dennis

Pedro_Lino · October 1, 2011, 5:57pm

Dennis, thank you for all the answers.

Sincerely, I'm surprised that you used Writer to edit a 1200 pages document.

I had to submit a 51 page report in Word and it was an absolute nightmare...
(BTW opening the same document in LO 3.4.3 shows how far cross-compatibility
still is )

Since ODF 1.2 documents will possibly cause problems with older software,
wouldn't it make more sense to have the option to Save As ODF 1.0 ODF 1.1 or
ODF 1.2 (in the same way that you can Save As Word 6.0 Word 95, etc) ???

I think this would be a lot more obvious than the current (almost hidden)
option to define which ODF format LO saves to...

Dennis_E_Hamilton · October 1, 2011, 6:14pm

Pedro. I agree that it would be more useful to have the choice of ODF version be available in the Save As ... dialog. There could still be a default, of course, and there are nice ways to reflect that in the Save As ... also.

That is not about the ODF specification of course.

It sounds like a great LibreOffice feature request and an opportunity to file a bug report.

Will you be doing that?

Regards,

- Dennis

Dennis_E_Hamilton · October 1, 2011, 9:21pm

Here's a post from a Microsoft participant on the ODF 1.2 announcement:
<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dmahugh/archive/2011/10/01/oasis-odf-1-2-approved.aspx>.
There's nothing about releases and support of ODF versions though.

marcpare · October 2, 2011, 12:11am

Hi Deni

The OASIS ODF 1.2 Committee Specification 01 has been successfully advanced to an OASIS Standard,<http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/tc-announce/201109/msg00010.html>.

The final ballot results for approval of OASIS Standard ODF 1.2 is at<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ballot.php?id=2115>.

Rob Weir has a nice summary on his blog,<http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/09/odf12-approved.html>. He lists the names of the contributors of 1.2 from the specification. Some of those names will be familiar here.

- Dennis

Congrats to the team, great news! I was wondering if we were already compliant with ODF1.2? If so we should market this along with LibreOffice -- backwards compatibility being fully supported of course.

Cheers,

Marc