Weekly Links

• 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.

• 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.

• Jochen Friedrich’s Open Blog: European Parliament takes clear stance on openness in the context of completing the internal market

  “More specifically, the parliament clearly requires the use of an open standard in the area of document formats. As stated in clause 41 the parliament “Highlights the importance of an open document exchange format for electronic business interoperation and calls on the Commission to take concrete steps to support its emergence and spread”. For sure, the Open Document Format (ODF) standard which was developed by OASIS and approved by ISO (ISO/IEC 26300) is the standard available for use today. It has been implemented in multiple competing products and is demonstrating interoperability in real life on a daily basis.”

  tags: ODF

• Save only in ODF | OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions

  “Force ODF saving format for opened DOC, XLS and PPT files. Save and SaveAs events result only ODF files, and the original DOC, XLS or PPT files get extra .safe file name extensions.”

  tags: ODF

• Large-scale migration to an open source office suite: An innovation adoption study in Finland

  “This study investigates the largest transition in Finland to an open source office suite and to an open standard for office documents. The IT environment of the open source OpenOffice.org migration involves more than 10 000 workstations in the Finnish Ministry of Justice and its administrative sector.”

  tags: ODF

• European Parliament wants Open Document exchange format for electronic business – Press releases

  “Strasbourg, Sept 21, 2010 — Today the European Parliament plenary adopted a report on completing the internal market for e-commerce prepared by Spanish rapporteur Pablo Arias Echeverría (EPP). The reports highlights the importance of an open document exchange format for electronic business interoperation and calls on the European Commission to take concrete steps to support its emergence and spread.”

  tags: ODF

• WebAIM: E-mail List Archives

  “If ISO-html goes beyond W3C recommendations, it goes too far. If
  ISO-html stops short of W3C recommendations, it doesn’t go far enough.
  If ISO-html matches W3C recommendations specifically, why bother?”

  tags: HTML ISO

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

• MATLAB Central – Newsreader – Does anyone else wish Matlab could handle Open …

  “I took this advice and utilized the ODFDOM library (part of the odftoolkit project) to implement an xlsread wrapper .m function that will read .ods files on a non-pc platform. The function imports and utilizes classes from the odfdom.jar library.”

  tags: ODFDOM ODF

• Open data formats | Voices Of Africa

  “How does this harm developing world? Well, the second part of the term “licensing fee,” is the little world, “fee.” You could also use “royalty fee,” or my more preferred term is, “stupid fee.” This fee trickles upwards into software cost. As many of us know, there are plenty of free software projects out there that can easily substitute paid-for software in terms of functionality, but being free software projects, they are unable to pay the licensing fees and therefore do not always support proprietary formats. Let’s continue to look at the trickle effect through a case example”

  tags: ODF

• Freoffice – KOffice based Open Mobile Office Suite: Digitally signed documents an ODF1..2 Feature in Freoffice

  “Digitally signed documents in the FreOffice which was demonstrated at the ODF inter-operability event at Budapest, Hungary last week, Take a look at the demo of this here”

  tags: ODF

• The ODF Podcast 002: Jos van den Oever and Inge Wallin | Open Document

  “On September 3rd OASIS ODF Adoption TC member Rob Weir sat down KDE community members Jos van den Oever (left) and Inge Wallin (right), in Budapest at the OpenOffice.org Conference, to discuss a range of topics, including the design philosphy of KOffice, its use of ODF 1.2’s new RDF metadata capabilities and the Nepomuk social semantic desktop project. You can listen to this interview in our second episode of the ODF Podcast.”

  tags: ODF

• Things I learn reading Microsoft TechNet

  “ODF files saved from Excel 2007 and 2010 are not compatible with most other implementations of ODF in other applications. The other applications can’t read the formulas. Excel uses its own functions and does not try to be compatible with OpenOffice, etc.”

  tags: ODF

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

• ODF Alliance Weblog

  “Last week, OASIS held the ODF 1.2 Interoperability Demonstration to showcase support for ODF 1.2 and the interoperability across eight implementations. The Demo showcased both open source and commercial software applications processing ODF documents on the desktop, in the cloud and on mobile devices, including IBM Lotus Symphony, KOffice, OpenOffice.org Novell Edition, Oracle Open Office, the Python programming library IpOD, Nokia Maemo FreOffice, and Open Framework Systems (OFS).”

  tags: ODF

• Understanding ODF – Open Document Format – Novus Office

  “The Open Document Format is a means of saving and encoding documents so that they can be freely opened and edited by non proprietary software. As an example, Microsoft’s .doc format for their Word documents is proprietary and requires that you use Microsoft software to open, edit and save the document. In contrast, the Novus .ODT format is an “open document format” and can be freely opened, edited and saved by numerous software applications.

  The benefits of using ODF compliant software are tremendous. The best reason to use this format is to avoid using expensive proprietary software like Microsoft Office.”

  tags: ODF

• Defining Open standards (Trond’s Opening Standard)

  “Telling when a standard is not open is even easier. Those involved in the struggle to establish an open document format know that very well. After some debate over a company owned document format, the owner decided to submit it for standardization. In the end, it became an ISO-standard, but that does not make it open, or useful, or important. Being developed in a transparent manner does. Listening to input does. Taking on board input counts even more. Meanwhile, another format was also being standardized. After a long fight, only one truly open standard remains, ODF.”

  tags: odf standards

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