Group tackles OpenOffice desktop spec (News.com)

Group tackles OpenOffice desktop spec (News.com)

I would like to send a document to someone who will modify it and send it back to me. I don't want to specify the layout, although I would like to be able to print the document with layout such that it will be pleasent to read. I want to use the same format for this document and another one which will be large and need a table of contents (in fact, this document might be a chapter of a larger document). I want to use footnotes and bibliography citations, and be able to change how these will be presented in a printed version depending on who I'm printing for. I want to be able to refer to other parts of the document in some way that will be useful when the document is printed. I would like the ability to use mathematical equations, images, etc, and refer to them both in their captions and in the text by their index in the document.

I'd like to be able to make a change to the middle of a very large document and see the change in an amount of time that does not depend on the size of the document. I would like to provide information about the document in a way which can be read by machine easily and accurately. I would like people who get my document to be able to cite it based on the file, without copying anything out of it by hand. I would like to have only semantic elements (i.e., not formatting or processing commands, but just things whose meaning is part of the meaning of the document). I would like to be able to define (separately, with instructions for how they should appear) and use elements of my own invention, when the standard set lacks the ones I want.

There are probably more things I'd like, but these are the ones that prohibit using PDF, HTML, or plain text. I got this list primarily from looking at what I needed in order to produce my thesis (in LaTeX), as well as the things I couldn't do because it was in LaTeX which I would have liked to be able to do.