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Taking Microsoft's ODF Plugin for a Spin... Splat (Groklaw)

Taking Microsoft's ODF Plugin for a Spin... Splat (Groklaw)

Posted Jul 20, 2006 23:43 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533)
In reply to: Taking Microsoft's ODF Plugin for a Spin... Splat (Groklaw) by azhrei_fje
Parent article: Taking Microsoft's ODF Plugin for a Spin... Splat (Groklaw)

But OOo was reverse engineering the Word format, and it's a pretty crufty
format by all accounts. ODF is all clean shiny and new and documented. It
shouldn't be beyond the wit of MS to read it properly.


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Taking Microsoft's ODF Plugin for a Spin... Splat (Groklaw)

Posted Jul 31, 2006 11:56 UTC (Mon) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

> ODF is all clean shiny and new and documented.

ODF might be new, but it isn't clean, shiny or particularly well documented.

The format itself is horrible if you're used to semantic markup (as compared to DocBook/XML for instance). Titles in ODF are paragraphs marked up with styles.

The documentation is horrible. It lacks examples and consists mainly of the original DTD (or whatever the equivalent is now called in XML) with interspersed comments.

I wrote a program at work to generate ODF documents for reporting. It was a long and painful process which involved a large amount of "generate what I need in OOo, unzip the file, remove tons of cruft, and try to work out what it's doing".

Rich.

Taking Microsoft's ODF Plugin for a Spin... Splat (Groklaw)

Posted Jul 31, 2006 13:09 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link]

Agreed. The documentation, at least, is a mess. After reading the 700+ page manual, I couldn't figure out how to build a "Hello, world!" document from scratch.

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