Format ODF approved as a national standard of the Russian Federation from June 1, 2011
(approximate translation notice)
Notice for acceptance

Designation of the document ISO / IEC 26300-2010
Name of the document (in Russian) Information technology. Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0
Name of the document (in English) Information technology. Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0
The Technical Committee of the Russian Federation 22 – Information Technology
Interstate TC
Information about registering 800-st Joined 12/21/2010
Date of entry into force of the document 01/06/2011
Introduced (for the first time, instead, to replace in part) for the first time
Relationship with other ND Identical ISO / IEC 26300:2006
Scope This document describes the XML-schema for office applications and its semantics. A scheme covers office documents including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings and presentations, but not limited to these types of documents.
A scheme provides a high level of informativeness required to edit documents. It describes the structure of XML for office documents, and simply changed by using XSLT or similar tools based on XML

Also news-link from ewdn
http://www.ewdn.com/2011/06/03/opendocuments-become-standard-in-russia/

In 1995, after the lost decade Lyx was started which is a sort of WYSIWYW program for Latex.
Today latex2rtf and oolatex allows you to produce documents in either rtf or ODF.

regards

Uwe Brauer

Just now out of frustration I tried out a ODF plugin for Word 2003, as provided by MS, Novel etc (it seems that the SUN ODF plugin is outdated please correct me if I am wrong).

# The installation needs its time and requires the original Word installation disc :(
# Finally I opened a doc with a resonable amount of complex tables and saved it as ODF
# I opened that file with OO 3.2.

What a disappointment. The ODF export filter is (a little) worse than OO doc import filter!
Tables a slightly misplaced, their size distorted.

I would say without a reasonable converter, (plugin) the doc format will continue to dominate.

regards

Uwe Brauer

Developed from scratch over a period of a few months by Richard Carr and friends, Framework so impressed Ashton-Tate, who had been watching with a sceptical eye, that they put up venture capital to productize it and get it into the market place, and bought it from the owners a year earlier than planned. It was thus a stable-mate and, to some extent, competitor of MultiMate.

With the demise of A-T, Framework came into the hands of Novell who took it from version III to IV, then sold it (competing with dBase?) on to Borland who possibly found it competing with their Sprint spreadsheet, and withdrew it from the market. An independent developer, whose customers had invested a lot of money into the development of custom Framework-based packages, intervened on their behalf and the behalf of users world-wide, and obtained a court order obliging Borland to sell him the source and the rights to Framework. Although there are undoubtedly some untold stories from this period which would be meaningful to Mr Flottorp, suffice it to say that Framework is still commercially available, now at version X, still capable of outrageous accomplishments and still satisfying the requirements of a coterie of connossieur clients whose custom packages have been under revision and extension from the early days of Framework, the package that is too good to die.

For the true devotee, you can get a special Framework keyboard which – in addition to various programmable keys – has two columns of Function keys down the left-hand side of the board, where they belong whence they were displaced by the 102/103 key boards which must have been introduced to slow secretaries down to a pace that Windows could (sometimes) cope with, much like the QWERTY layout was introduced to stop typewriter keys from jamming too often in a sticky mess of bent arms an inch from the paper as typistes outran the capability of the machine in their haste to finish a document before hometime.

Also deserving a (less but still reasonably) honourable mention was Claris Works, which was quite widely distributed at one point, but then IIRC was sucked up by IBM for rebadging and packaging with OS/2.

On the PC-front, this lasted long after ND decided to close down (has it?) – by the sale of most of the “text editors” that you care to mention was looked on as a “curiosity” in (Northern) Europe.

I wrote a thesis on a proportional spacing text editor and printer system, running CP/M in 1980. It was one of the first research reports where the typewriters were skipped, and used to proofread only.

In those days, the US did every trick possible, legal or unjust, regardless to stop anyone abroad. We were not allowed to sell 32 bit computers to other than NATO countries, and although some of us had worked and provided core technology to Intel, they denied us the right to emulate their instruction set. When typical benchmarks were 10 times better to 10% of the price, we still saw US contracts not being awarded for the silliest reason.

The Open Document Format is much older than 5 years, because it is part of ODMA (Open Document Management Architecture) that we worked on at ND.

Jeremy Salter participated in the ODMA standardisations – so I would guess around 1986. NOTIS-WP was the general purpose text entry module of the “NOTIS” family. This had interface to “DS” – Document Storage and “ID” – mail. So, sent an email by storing it in the OutTray and pinning recipients to it.

The high end, dedicated typesetters of ND Comtec would take a WP document and typeset directly into the newspaper for publishing. This is described in numerous Seybold reports. There are still a number of functionality that NOTIS supported that no current system can do – such as changing language when you want to, or enter a number as a equation with or without fields. A popular macro was to make the system calculate e.g. pi over the weekend, and see how far it had come by Monday morning. You could also include WP as a “executing object” in workflow, and integrate with the “DIALOG” family of administrative applications and tools – such as Unique. Another “IR – information Repository was a 3rd party “DS” that could be used. The “IR” was searchable with “SIFT” and provided storage and fast retrieval in numerous European public offices. WP and the NOTIS modules were sold in the US. The most famous copy-cat is Microsoft’s Access, that is a blueprint of NOTIS-QL – the database query and application building module.

One large customer to ND was CERN in Geneva. They worked with ND R&D and developed high capacity computer links, and that included fibre in those days. So, the systems was made with transparent localisation – with “COSMOS”. ND also supplied the tcp/ip node machine for CERN and Northern Europe. This is the link then to the mark-up language we use on the Internet, and the industrial systems that inspired the initial developments. ND supplied their own OSI-based communication HW and software (“XMSG”) – and tcp/ip was a parallel development, but used by CERN. and large customers outside northern Europe. The F16 simulators, military multiprocessor clusters, Ariane launch system used XMSG – and not tcp/ip.

ND manufactured super-minicomputers and could not care less about developing a graphical user interface, unless they saw a way of making a fortune doing so. Storing documents meant selling more disks. To exchange and share as on the Internet was far, far away. But this is the link you do not have.

ND NOTIS was in a paper by the European Commission presented as prototype for an ideal system archiecture in 1986 – and this included the ODMA initial standards for document storage, indexing and search. This was produced for the British Computing Society, End User Subgroup where the ND logos and system names where removed and replaced. Apart from that, it was a blueprint of the architecture and systems that was proposed.

Cheers,
Wol

There’s a wikipedia article about it :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter

Lotus Symphony (the first one) – I used this in 1984 +
Framework – I used this 1986 – 1989 (about)

Both contained decent (for their time) word processors. Framework was very innovative and allowed inserting graphics, graphs and spreadsheets into common documents (using “frames”)

FWIW

Just to complicate things, vi includes an ex mode, so it can be a line editor if you really want that sort of thing.

Ed dates back to the earliest days of Unix. Ex was an early project at Berkeley.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi

You could edit large, complex documents with it [including text flow across linked frames, with placement and formatting options similar to desktop publishing programs]. It was also an early example of multithreaded programming [threads for rendering in multiple windows, printing, continuous background versioning]. The developers wrote their own portability framework [OS/2 -> Win32] allowing them to have a Win32 native word processor several months before Microsoft. They also had working object embedding / DDE for live documents years before other vendors.

What killed the product was the inability to import from later versions of word processors – they were relying on a third party library [from Xerox?] that went stale.

Another one that I used a lot from about 1981 until 1995 or so was Atari Writer. It ran on the Atari 400/800 systems and was shipped on a ROM cartridge.