ODF

Throwing stones at people in glass houses

2006/07/27 By Rob 9 Comments

I work in a house with glass walls. Not literally, of course. The cost to air-condition such a house would be prohibitive. I mean that working on standard in OASIS is a public act, with process transparency and public visibility. The public doesn’t see merely the end-product, or quarterly drafts, they can see (if they are so inclined) every discussion, every disagreement and every decision made by the TC, in near real-time. Our meeting minutes for our TC calls are posted for public inspection. Our mailing list archives, where most of the real work occurs, is there for the public to view. The comments submitted by the public are also available for anyone to read. This information is all archived from when the TC first met back in 2002, all the way to the discussions we’re having today on spreadsheet formula namespaces.

One result of this openness is that it is very easy, trivial even, for our critics to simply read our mailing list, look for a disagreement or discussion of an issue, and repeat our words, usually out of context. Cut & Paste. This is certainly the most efficient way to criticize ODF since it minimizes the amount of thinking required. However, this is a bit tedious, especially when this is applied so asymmetrically, as I shall now explain.

Ecma TC45, the committee producing Office Open XML (OOXML), does not operate in such a transparent manner. They do not have a public mailing list archive. They have not published their meeting minutes. The comments they receive from the public are not open for the public to read. The public has no idea what exactly the TC is working on, what issues they think are critical, whether the TC is in unanimous agreement, whether there is spirited debated or whether Microsoft dominates and determines everything. The fact that they have not yet sent OOXML for an Ecma vote is proof that believe the specification is not yet ready for standardization. But we know no details of what exactly is lacking, what problems are being fixed or, more importantly, what defects are being allowed to remain.

And in this way, the ODF-bashers take advantage of our openness, while holding their deliberations in obscurity. They throw rocks at our glass house while hiding in the shadows.

So this openness at OASIS has an apparent downside. But honestly, I wouldn’t trade it for any alternative. Making a standard, especially one this important, is a privilege, not a right. The public deserves to know how a standard is made, the same way and for the same reasons they deserve to know how legislation is made. I relish this scrutiny because I know it makes us stronger.

Sun’s Simon Phipps has posted his keynote from the recent OSCON conference. The topic was the “Zen of Free” and, among other goodies, Phipps lists 5 requirements for “full support for fully open standards”, of which I quote the 4th, since it states the point better than I have:

…the standard [Phipps here speaking generically and not about any specific standard] should have been created transparently. Just as an open source community looks with concern on a large, monolithic code contribution, so we should be wary of standards created without the opportunity for everyone to participate or, failing that, with a full explanation of every decision that was made in its construction. Without that there’s a chance that it’s designed to mesh with some facility or product that will be used to remove our freedom later.

Another way to attack openness is to do it with legal restrictions. For example, we’re seeing many references to a year-old performance evaluation of an atypical spreadsheet file, and using that to make the ridiculous claim that the ODF format itself is too slow. I’d love to dispute that claim and show it for what it is. I’d love to show that for most common document sizes, ODF documents are actually smaller and faster to load and save than OOXML documents. I’d love to show you all this, but I can’t. Why? Because Microsoft won’t let me. The only implementation of OOXML is the Office 2007 beta, and the End User License Agreement (EULA) has this language:

7. SCOPE OF LICENSE. …You may not disclose the results of any benchmark tests of the software to any third party without Microsoft’s prior written approval

So, our critics can quote benchmark results about ODF running in OpenOffice, but we can’t quote numbers about OOXML running in Office. They can read our mailing lists and quote us discussing ODF issues as we address them, but we cannot even see what they are working on.

What should we make of all this? I suggest that no specification is perfect. That’s why we have version numbers. The question you need to ask yourself is: what leads to a better specification, full and open public discussion and scrutiny? Or something rushed through behind closed doors? You know what the issues with ODF are, and you’ll continue to hear the same small list over and over again. But this is a shrinking list, as the ODF TC experts address these issues. But do you know what the issues with OOXML are, the reasons why Ecma TC45 has not yet put forward their specification as an Ecma standard? What do their experts say when speaking candidly about their specification? The public simply doesn’t not know. Do we assume silence means perfection? I don’t think so.

Add-in finitum

2006/07/26 By Rob 3 Comments

In this post, I will take another look at the Microsoft ODF Add-in debate, suggest some criteria for use in evaluating file format integration, and use those criteria to evaluate both Office 2007’s support for the ODF formats, and OpenOffice’s support for Microsoft’s formats.

My examination of the ODF Add-in for Word (here and here) has sparked a spirited discussion on both sides of the issue. A balanced view is given by Jason Brooks on eWeek.com:

It’s certainly going too far to call Microsoft’s currently lukewarm support for ODF a change of heart, but it is nonetheless an encouraging instance of Microsoft listening to its customers. We call on Microsoft to make way for ODF in the standard supported-file-formats list giving it at least the same stature as the formats of the suite’s once-fierce rivals.

In that spirit I’d like to propose some evaluation criteria for what first-class file format integration looks like, so you’ll recognize it when you see it. I’ll use Word and ODF word processorr documents (.odt file extensions) as an example, but the points apply equally to other formats and other editors:

Is the format support “in the box”, installed and configured when you do a default install?
When you open the default File/Open dialog (the one you get with the Control-O shortcut, the one we all know and have been using for 20 years), do ODF files show up? In other words, does the default file mask include *.odt, or can you at least easily select ODF from the drop-down list of file formats?
If you create a new document in Word, and then type Control-S to save the document, is ODF available on the list of file formats you can save to?
Can an end user or administrator (no coding required) make ODF be the default format for saving documents?
If you open an ODF document, and change it and then Control-S to save it, will this occur?Or will it save to some other format? Or will you get an error?
Is support integrated into the Windows shell via the registry, so you can double-click on an ODF file on the desktop, in a folder or as an email attachment and it will automatically launch in Word? If you are like me, 90% of the time you are not opening a document from within Word, but you are launching Word with a file in this manner

Is there anything here I’m missing?

Let’s compare, using the above criteria, how well Word’s DOC format is treated in OpenOffice 2.0.3, and how ODF is treated in Word 2007 beta 2:

Criterion	DOC Format in OpenOffice	ODF Format in Word
1. Format supported in default install	Yes.	No. Requires a download and install of separate, unsupported Add-in.
2. File Open integration	Yes.	No. ODF is not listed in the default File Open dialog and doing a Control-O will not show ODF documents. However, ODF import is available in a separate menu item elsewhere in the menu system.
3. Save new document integration	Yes.	No. In fact no ODF save ability exists in the current version of the Add-in. There is a place holder for the ODF save operation, though it is on its own menu, and would not be shown when doing a simple Control-S to save a new document.
4. Can be made the default format	Yes.	No. Although other non-Microsoft formats, such as “Plain Text” can be made the default format, ODF cannot.
5. Simple round-tripping	Yes.	No. When an ODF document is loaded, its name is automatically changed and it is made read-only. So loading sampler.odt results in Word having a read-only version of sampler_tmp.docx. Attempting a simple Control-S to save will give an error.
6. Shell integration	Yes.	No.

Once again, the open source community wins. Not only is the fidelity of OpenOffice’s support for MS Office formats higher, but they provide much closer integration of these competing formats.

I’m reading many explanations and excuses for why Office’s support for ODF is the way it is. Here is a selection to ponder:

Brian Jones, a Program Manager for MS Office, said of the Add-in support:

It’s directly exposed in the UI. We’re even going to make it really easy to initially discover the download. We already need to do this for XPS and PDF, so we’ll also do it for ODF. There will be a menu item directly on the file menu that takes to you a site where you can download different interoperability formats (like PDF, XPS, and now ODF).

I guess we differ how we define “directly exposed” and “really easy”. IMHO, the easiest way to make this easy to find would be to install it with Office and put it in the normal place in the menus.

Also, in Office 2007 Beta 2, which I have in front of me, PDF and XPS are in the normal File Save and File Save As menus, not treated separately. I understand that there is a dispute with Adobe and so you are deciding to move the PDF and the competing XPS options out of the main File Save dialog, but that just proves my point. This is clearly a policy decision not a technical restriction. The fact is that PDF and XPS both work fine where they are in the File Save menu in Office 2007 beta 2.

Brian Jones again:

We already have the PDF and XPS support for Office 2007 users that unfortunately had to be separated out of the product and instead offered as a free download.

I agree that this is unfortunate. Full integration should mean it is included in the product and supported in the usual places. I’ll take your world that PDF had to be taken out for non-technical reasons. But what prevents ODF from being integrated at that level?

And Jones on Interoperability by Design:

You see a lot of folks talk about interoperability, but often they just don’t mean the same thing. From our perspective it’s something we want to build directly into the products so that it just works.

That is a reasonable goal. I like it. By this definition, will we ever see a Microsoft-sponsored effort, open source or otherwise, to make ODF so it it is built “directly into the product so that it just works”? As pointed out above, a bunch of open source developers have already given this level of support to Office formats in OpenOffice. Isn’t it embarrassing to be unable to accomplish the same task in Office 2007?

Patrick Schmid is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer who has obvious deep knowledge of Office Add-ins and customizations. He writes:

It is possible to write a custom file import/export converter for Word. This would add the file type supported by the converter to the file type lists in the Open and Save As dialogs. Unfortunately, this is not an option for the ODF translator project.

I will accept Schmid’s technical appraisal of Microsoft’s ODF Add-in, since he obviously knows far more about these API’s than I do. However, this limitation appears to me to be a chosen limitation based on how this functionality was designed. Microsoft for years has provided import/export support for other file formats, often competing file formats, and they have always put them in the normal File Open/File Save dialogs. Why the sudden change? You can’t hide behind limitations caused by choices that you choose voluntarily when other less constrained choices were available and in fact more typical.

Further:

The Open & Save As dialogs cannot be customized: There simply is no way for an add-in to add another file format to the file type list in those dialogs. I checked this with the Office beta team just to be sure.

There is no way to do this? When the Open Document Foundation responded to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s RFI requesting info about the feasibility of an ODF Plugin, their response included screen shots of what appears to be the File Open/File Save dialogs in MS Office allowing the read and write of ODF files, side by side with the built-in formats like DOC. I hope this will not prove to be another embarrassment, where open source developers accomplish another task which Microsoft says is impossible.

Schmid further writes:

Why should MS waste resources on providing one particular feature for add-in developers that most Office add-in developers (all not affiliated with Microsoft) would put at the very bottom of their wish list?

Keep in mind that a single ODF Add-in could satisfy millions of customers. So we shouldn’t count the value by the number of add-ins which could be written, but by the number of end-users who would use the add-in.

Stay tuned. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this issue. In particular I’d like to hear more about this Open Document Foundation Plugin, and the closer integration they illustrated in their RFI response.

Lost in Translation

2006/07/14 By Rob 3 Comments

In the last installment I looked at the way the ODF Add-in for Word 2007 integrates into the Word UI. Now let’s drill down into an actual conversion and see what fidelity we get.

I downloaded the code from SourceForce and installed on a machine running the Office 2007 beta 2. The Add-in pre-reqs the .NET 2.0 runtime, an additional 22MB download. The current version only supports reading ODF documents, not writing, and only handles the word processor ODF format.

Now for fidelity. Since you may not all have Office 2007 beta 2 installed, I’m going to show you the fidelity via PDF exports. In all cases I manually verified that the PDF output was identical to what I saw on the screen, every error is real, nothing introduced by the PDF export process.

First up is a document I call “the sampler”. It has a little bit of all the basic word processor formatting, fonts, alignment, nested tables, graphics, other character sets, headers/footers, images, captions, etc. It is not intended to be a particularly hard test of document conversion, but a basic test of core functionality.

So, here is the sampler, in the original ODF format, as well as the PDF rendering of it in OpenOffice 2.0.3, where it was originally created.

I then exported that file from OpenOffice to Word format. This demonstrates the quality of conversion users already get when running OpenOffice. Here is is in DOC and PDF exported after loaded the DOC file in Word 2007 beta 2.

Good, but not perfect. Some differences:

the bullet point size larger in Word than in OpenOffice
the nested table collapsed into main table in Word
the above table problem causes the table to take up more vertical space, pushing the graphic onto a second page

Again, that is the OpenOffice –> Word conversion we all have available for free today in open source code. Since DOC is a proprietary binary format with inadequate publicly-available documentation, this level of fidelity is impressive. So moving from ISO ODF to Draft Office Open XML should be that much easier, especially since the target format is voluminously documented (4,000 pages and growing), and the writers of the translator are receiving technical assistance from Microsoft.

Let’s take a look. From within Word 2007 (beta 2) I use the ODF Add-in to load the sampler ODF file, and get something that looks like this PDF.

I won’t characterize it but to say it fared less well than I expected. Problems include:

headers/footers dropped (data loss)
bullet list indentation ignored
number list indentation ignored
table dimensions messed up
caption for the graphics sized and positioned incorrectly

Whether these are all bugs or merely functional limitations is an interesting question. There is a Functional Specification document available on SourceForge for the Add-in which lists these requirement:

2.1.1.1. Basic Formatting

Here is the list of formatting items that the Add-in and command line translator would keep intact. The first 10 in the list are must haves and the last 4 (number 11 to 14) are good to have items of formatting.

Bold

Italics

Underline

Bulleting

Numbering

Indentation

Alignment (Left, Center, Right)

Font size

Font face

Tabs

Tables

Font color

Highlights

Background colors

Tables are “nice to have”? I’d hope so! This does not give me the impression that full fidelity is in their plans. Forget about scripts and macros. They are not even planning on tables or font colors. I hope I am wrong or misinterpreting their plans here, but that is the requirements document they have posted.