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Archives for October 2010

ODF Plugfest — Brussels

2010/10/28 By Rob 4 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I was in Brussels to participate in the 4th ODF Plugfest.  I planned on writing up  a nice long post about it.  But right when I started to draft this blog post, I came across an excellent article in LWN.net by Koen Vervloesem (Twitter @koenvervloesem): ODF Plugfest: Making office tools interoperable.  Since his article is far better than what I would have written,  I recommend that you go and read that article first, and then come back here for what meager additional scraps of insight I can add.

Go ahead.  I can wait.  I’ll be here when you get back.

The ODF Plugfest format is a two-day event.  On one day engineers from the vendors work together, peer-to-peer, on interoperability testing, debugging, resolving issues, etc.  This is done in a closed session, with no press present, and with a gentlemen’s agreement not to use information from this session to attack other vendors.  We want the Plugfest to be a “safe zone” where vendors can do interoperability work where it is most needed, using unreleased software, alpha or beta code in some cases.   For this to work we need an environment where engineers can do this work, without fear that each bug in their beta product will be instantly maligned on the web.  This would be anti-productive, since it would repel the very products we need most to attend Plugfests.

I think customers would be proud to see their vendors putting their differences aside for the day to work on interoperability.  Although among the vendors and organizations present there were several fierce competitors, two parties to a prominent patent infringement lawsuit and both sides of a prominent fork of a popular open source project, you would not have guessed this if you watched the engineers collaborating at the Plugfest.   A key part to this neutrality is that the Plugfests are sponsored and hosted by public sector parties and universities and non-profits.  In this case we were hosted by the Flemish government.

So that was the first day of the Plugfest, and for the details I can say no more, for the reasons I’ve stated.

On the 2nd day we have a public session, with vendors, but also the press, local public sector IT people, local IT companies, etc.  The program and presentations are posted.  My presentation on ODF 1.2 is also up on my publications page.

A few leftover notes that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere:

  • We had great participation from AbiWord, where developers apparently have funding to work on their ODF 1.2 support.
  • DIaLOGIKa announced that after their next release they will no longer have funding from Microsoft to continue work on their ODF Add-in for Office.  The code, however,  will remain as open source.  Since Oracle has commercialized the previously free Sun ODF Plugin, this means that there is no longer any free, actively developed means of getting ODF support on Office 2003.  If you want ODF support on Office, you must upgrade to Office 2007 or Office 2010.
  • Some good demos of new ODF-supporting software, including LetterGen, OFS Collaboration Suite, ODT2EPub and odt2braille.
  • Itaapy announced that they were close to releasing a C++ version of their popular lpOD library (already available in Python)

In standards work, on committees with endless conference calls and endless draft specifications and the minutia of clause and phrase, it is too easy to mistakenly view that narrow world as your customer.  So when I attend events like this and see the rapid growth of ODF-supporting software and the innovative work that is happening among implementors, I return reinvigorated.  These are the real customers.  This is what it is all about.  I’m already looking forward to the next ODF Plugfest.

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Filed Under: Interoperability, ODF

Weekly Links #24

2010/10/09 By Rob Leave a Comment

  • Sean McGrath: KLISS: Author/edit sub-systems in legislative environments

    “KLISS [Kansas Legislative Information Services System] makes extensive use of ODF for units of information in the asset repository. “

    tags: ODF

  • Here there be Dragons | IT PRO blogs

    “Meanwhile, in organisations not beholden to the great god of Seattle, they have gone for free software or bought in one of the many cheap, reliable and better options. Such as SunOffice, NeoOffice and OpenOffice. Their users happily swap ODF files between each other and can all access them. The software is clean and easy to use and did I mention free?”

    tags: ODF

  • IDUG Solutions Journal [PDF]

    Includes an article “Using DB2 pureXML and ODF Spreadsheets”

    tags: ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Filed Under: Weekly Links

ODF Ingredients

2010/10/05 By Rob 2 Comments

I think you will enjoy this graphic. Click for a larger view.  This is a chart of all of the standards that ODF 1.2 refers to, what we standards geeks call “normative references”.  A normative reference takes definitions and requirements from one standard and uses it, by reference, in another.  It is a form of reuse, reusing the domain analysis, specification and review work that went into creating the other standard.  Each reference is color coded and grouped by the organization that owns the referenced standard, W3C, IETF, ISO, etc., and placed on a time line according to when that standard was published

I’m sure each reader will note interesting patterns on their own, but a few things stood out in my mind when looking at this chart:

  • ODF is very much built on top of web and internet standards from the W3C and IETF.  That is where the bulk of our references are from.  This is true not only of the older stuff from the web’s initial standardization effort in 1998-2000, but also for more recent work like GRDDL, RDFa and XForms 1.1.  As documents start living more of a dual-life, on the desktop and on the web (and even mobile), this web standards heritage of ODF will continue to open new doors for ODF implementors and users.
  • Except for a few bedrock standards like Unicode, ISO just doesn’t register.  They simply are not doing a lot of relevant work in this area.
  • A good response when you are faced with critics who claim that ODF is just based on what OpenOffice.org does.  You can point out that OpenOffice was first released as open source in  2000 and via StarOffice had a proprietary history going back to 1984.  So if ODF is merely a dump of what OpenOffice does, then why is ODF built on so many standards that did not exist in 2000?  Does time travel explain it?  Or maybe clairvoyance?  Or maybe, just maybe it is just good engineering to reference relevant standards in your domain rather than reinvent a proprietary version of everything?
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Filed Under: ODF

Is ODF Green?

2010/10/03 By Rob 11 Comments

Green IT is concerned with approaches to information technology that reduce the environmental impact from the manufacture, use and disposal of computers and peripherals.    Occasionally I am asked whether Open Document Format (ODF) has any relationship to “Green IT”.    This is an interesting question, and the fact that the question is asked at all suggests that Green IT goals are increasing playing a central role in decision making.

When an organization migrates from Microsoft Office and their binary file formats (DOC/XSL/PPT) and moves to ODF, they will immediately notice that ODF documents are much smaller than the corresponding Microsoft format documents.  This is a benefit of the ZIP compression applied to the contents of ODF documents.  It also reflects that fact that Microsoft-format documents, especially ones that have been edited and saved many times, tend to accumulate unused blocks in the file, blocks which are not used, but still bloat the file’s storage.

As an experiment I went to a prominent government web site (the US President’s www.whitehouse.gov) and downloaded all DOC files that were at the site, 293 documents total.  Then I converted each document into ODF format.  The percent reduction from moving to ODF was 66% on average.   Smaller documents means less disk storage required, less bandwidth required to transfer documents, less bloating of mail files with document attachments, etc.

Looking at the results in more detail, however, shows a more complex picture.  The following chart shows that although the average size reduction from moving to ODF was 66%, some documents were compressed 80% or more, while others were hardly compressed at all:

What is going on here?  A look at a scatter plot of original DOC size versus ODF size more clearly shows the pattern:

You can see here two trend lines, one of documents that are barely compressed at all, and another one where the compression rate is high.  Manual inspection of the poorly compressed documents indicates what is going on.  Some of the documents are dominated by the size of embedded image files with high color depth and resolution.   These images were already compressed, and so could not be compressed further, at least not by ODF’s ZIP compression.  However, in some cases the image files were of a resolution unnecessary for screen or casual print output.  Screen resolution is typically only 75 dpi.   Attaching images at 300 dpi or more wastes space, unless you know you are targeting high-resolution photo-quality output.  I think we’ve all been on the receiving end of an improbably large document, that when loaded contains relatively little content.  Often the culprit is a multi-megabyte image, with only a small cropped portion showing, but the entire image is stored.  There is nothing a document format can do to prevent user actions like this, but an intelligent editor (or plugin) could detect this and prompt the user to convert the image to a more appropriate resolution when saving.

So in summary, yes, a move to ODF will cause your documents to be far smaller than they were before, and that has advantages in terms of storage and bandwidth consumption.  But let’s be honest, when it comes to disk storage and bandwidth documents are not your biggest problem.  Graphics and video are far larger.

But if we look broader we see that the bigger Green advantage of ODF comes not only from the document size reduction, but from the alternatives ODF enables:

  1. Replace a paper-based workflow with an all-electronic workflow
  2. Replace a car or plane trip with electronic document-based collaboration
  3. Use a word processor that can run on your existing hardware rather than upgrading everyone to new hardware so they can run the latest MS Windows/MS Office.
  4. Use a less expensive word processor and by doing so free up resources to fund other Green initiatives in your workplace.

Postscript

So what about OOXML?  Honestly, no one asked me that question before.  I think is a testament to the intelligence of my associates.  “Is it Green to throw out your 2005 laptop, buy a new, likely high-energy consumption one, pay for Windows 7 and Office 2010,  just so you can do the same work you did before?”  I think the answer is obvious.  Of course not.  For 99% of us the limitation on our productivity is not whether we have the latest software and hardware .  The limitation is our own skills and our working habits.     A word processor with a flashier interface doesn’t make you write better or write faster.  To think otherwise is to be like the amateur  golf player who thinks that their game will improve, if only they have the latest (and most expensive) gear.

But to satisfy the curiosity of those who care about OOXML, let me give you the results of the same documents, as converted to the DOCX format.  ODF still wins in this case.  The ODF files are 18% smaller on average than the equivalent OOXML ones.

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Filed Under: ODF

Weekly Links #23

2010/10/02 By Rob Leave a Comment

  • How to be a data journalist | News | guardian.co.uk

    tags: statistics

  • New ISO standard for special math functions

    A good example of how ISO fails to encourage harmonized standards. These function definitions would be perfect for reusing in a variety of other standards, or at least for harmonizing with other standards that also define scientific functions, like ISO/IEC 29500 and ODF 1.2’s OpenFormula. But even peer standards professionals in other ISO committees and liaisons are not given free access to these standards. We would need to pay over $100 for the privilege of volunteering to write better ISO standards.

    tags: standards

  • Gary Barnett’s Blog » Blog Archive » Open Office : Well and truly forked

    “I’d take all the source code for OpenOffice and print it out onto paper. Then I’d erase it from the repository. I’d store the paper print-outs at the top of a tower, surrounded by an alligator filled swamp, fifty miles from the development lab.

    Sure, the developers can re-use that old code, I’ve no problem at all – It’s just got to be worth the effort of walking to the swamp, wading through the murky waters, wrastling the ‘gators, climbing the tower and copying the source out by hand. If they’re not willing to do that, then that code just isn’t worth it.

    Next I’d go way back to basics – take something like CKEditor as my base, then look at what I’d need to do to make it produce ODF.”

    tags: ODF

  • Le blog de l’équipe d’Itaapy. – Internationalisation de documents ODF

    “La librairie iTools, librairie sous licence GPL, développée par l’équipe d’Itaapy, offre de nombreux outils permettant de faciliter l’internationalisation.
    Grâce à ces outils, il est possible de traduire très rapidement un document ODF (ODT/ODS/ODP). Le principe est simple et tient en 3 étapes !”

    tags: ODF

  • OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument Format Promotion Group founded

    “On September 14th foundation of OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument Format Promotion Group (ODPG) was announced.”

    tags: ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Filed Under: Weekly Links

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