This week at LWN: Officeshots: making ODF truly interoperable

Posted by Sander_Marechal on Dec 3, 2009 8:48 AM EDT
LWN.net; By Koen Vervloesem
Mail this story
Print this story

Complex file formats, such as those used for office documents, inevitably lead to differences in interpretation by application developers. If a user sends a document to someone else who views it in a different application or version, chances are that the output shows some subtle differences or, by bad luck, that the formatting is completely munged. These problems are not tied to proprietary file formats: open standards such as ODF (Open Document Format) also have interoperability issues. A web service, Officeshots, was recently launched to remedy this problem. The project is in public beta and users can register for free to upload their ODF documents. The web site then generates the output of the document using various office applications, which enables the user to check for interoperability issues. The launch of the public beta took place during the second ODF plugfest in Orvieto, Italy on November 2nd and 3rd. A lot of vendors and developers using ODF in their software gathered in Orvieto, such as IBM, Google, OpenOffice.org, Novell, KOffice, AbiWord, and Microsoft.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Editorial, News Story; Groups: Community

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.