Weekly Links

• BE: Political party moving to a complete open source desktop

  “Ecolo, a green political party in Belgium, is planning to complete its move to a complete open source desktop system by the end of 2011. On the 220 workstations in its main office, it will gradually replace the underlying operating system to Ubuntu Linux, says Sebastien Bollingh, the party’s ICT manager. “

  tags: ODF

• The Guardian on switching to ODF | Open Source Schools

  “The key stumbling block for councils, as for schools, appears to be compatibility with others systems, most notably those supplied by Capita. Liam calls for the Cabinet Office to strengthen its present position on open source and open standards by mandating ODF as a standards across the public sector, were this to happen I don’t doubt that we’d see Capita quickly make SIMS and their other products compatible with OpenOffice.org, making it far easier for schools and councils to choose their office suite from all those available, rather than forcing them to pay for MS Office, bundled with ‘features’ which many will rarely if ever use.”

  tags: ODF

• The need for Open Document Format by Dr Yusri

  tags: ODF

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

• IBM Lotus Symphony – Buzz: IBM Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 is now available

  “Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 represents a major new advancement for our Lotus Symphony users. Based on current OpenOffice.org 3 code stream. Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 offers loads of new features and capabilities and improved file fidelity. The Lotus Symphony team is excited to get it out to you and get your feedback.”

  tags: ODF Symphony

• Councils ‘could save at least £51m’ with shift to ODF and open source | Technology | guardian.co.uk

  “If one council goes to a service provider such as Capita and asks for a change to its Revenues and Benefits system so it works with OpenOffice and ODF instead of Microsoft Office, Capita will tell them to go away. But if government mandates it, then Capita or any of these other companies that do this work for councils could get it done in six months.”

  tags: ODF

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

• Legislative Open Document Format (LODF)

  “History has shown over and over again that legislative data standards must be flexible in order to succeed. LODF (Legislative Open Document Format) is the first legislative data standard initiative that fully embraces that reality. LODF integrates legislative document semantics with the ODF XML standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). All LODF documents are – by definition – ODF compliant. LODF acts as a layer of extra semantic features layered on top of ODF that capture the salient information regarding legislative document types such as bills, statute, journals etc. “

  tags: ODF

• Demo: Attachment viewer supports JAR files and ODF thumbnails! » Balfes.net

  “A new extension has been added to the attachment viewer to support ODF thumbnails. As I learned from a colleague last week the ODF file format is really just an archive (ZIP to be exact) so the same Java API’s I used for the ZIP provider work equally as well in the ODF file provider. I enhanced the ODF provider to only show image files since there is a lot of directory structure and XML in the file. “

  tags: ODF Notes

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

• VML is baack… – Aspose.Words Product Family – Blogs

  “But the interesting thing that we came across is that ISO 29500 allows extensions and Microsoft did not waste any time by implementing something that is known as [MS-ODRAWXML]: Office Drawing Extensions to Office Open XML Structure Specification. This document basically puts VML back into ISO 29500 Strict documents via the standard extension mechanism.”

  tags: OOXML

• MATLAB Central – File detail – Read Open Document Format Spreadsheet (.ods)

  MatLab routine that calls into ODFDOM to load data from an ODF spreadsheet

  tags: ODF ODFDOM

• odt2braille brings Braille to OpenOffice.org – The H Open Source: News and Features

  “The release of odt2braille by the Belgian university Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, has brought the ability to work with Braille to OpenOffice.org. The extension adds a “Braille” menu to OpenOffice.org’s Writer which allows users to translate documents into Braille formats such as .brf or .pef or send the content to Braille printers for embossing. The development was supported by the EU funded AEGIS project.”

  tags: ODF

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

• odf-report – GitHub

  “Gem for generating .odt files by making strings, images, tables and sections replacements in a previously created .odt file.”

  tags: ODF

• My Personal Blog: ODF Become National Format?

  “What a surprising news. ODF will soon become a mandatory format for all government documents. I have posted this since a year ago and two years ago, but finally it will come true. Right now, the Indonesian government is trying to migrate all computers in the governmental level to use Open Source to reduce it’s spending just to buy licenses for Windows and many other Microsoft products (mostly Microsoft Office). When that target has been completed (estimated 2011), they will follow with standarizing the national format to use ODF.”

  tags: ODF

• Phase relationships in the standardization process

  tags: standards

• 1’s and 0’s – The Daily WTF

  Reminds me of OOXML’s Bits.  Bad idea then and now.

  tags: ooxml

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