I am back from KDE’s aKademy 2006 held this year on the campus of Trinity College in Dublin. Tuesday the 26th was “OpenDocument Day” and we heard from a variety of speakers on that topic.
The keynote was by Barbara Held from the EC’s IDABC (Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens), giving a good overview of their important work.
Then through the remainder of the morning and early afternoon we heard a variety of “lighting talks” on various ODF-related topics. You can see the full list and the posted presentations here, but I’d like to highlight a few of them here.
Prof. Lotzi Bölöni from the Networking and Mobile Computing Laboratory at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Central Florida presented on the work he and his students are doing to create a comprehensive test suite of ODF sample documents. Each sample document is keyed to the relevant ODF specification page, and each comes with screen shots showing how that feature renders in OpenOffice.org and KOffice. This is an excellent tool for verifying interoperability of the implementations and also for identifying any ambiguities in the specification.
Tim Eves from SIL International presented on their charitable work with producing writing systems for minority languages as well as the fonts and software to support these encodings. Since FOSS word processor like KOffice and OpenOffice will often be used in such contexts, it is important to understand what additional font feature support might be needed in ODF to support this work.
I gave a presentation entitled “A Standard ODF Object Model” proposing an Open Document Developers Kit (ODDK) to enable application developers to become productive quickly with this format. If you’ve read my previous write-up
The In Dublin’s Fair City by Rob Weir, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
