You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
Inspired by the pothole identification and alert site and app, fixmystreet.com, OFE, through its fixmydocuments.eu, is giving a crowd-sourced voice to public frustration with software interoperability limitations that stand in the way of citizens who are seeking to communicate and interact with government. It should be noted, however, this is more than a vehicle through which to vent. Many parts of the EU are legitimately working hard to implement ODF, the open document format for office applications. Fixmydocuments.eu will help them better identify software and documents that are presenting the most pressing and immediate problems. As an added benefit, it should not go unnoticed that more fully deploying ODF and other open standards will help the EU avoid vendor lock-in."
Posted Feb 5, 2015 11:23 UTC (Thu)
by zoobab (guest, #9945)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Feb 5, 2015 13:40 UTC (Thu)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
Posted Feb 5, 2015 13:42 UTC (Thu)
by lgeorget (guest, #99972)
[Link] (2 responses)
Auto-completed PDFs are useful. You can have them auto-completed like web forms. If you want to save an offline copy, it's easier than with webpages (and you have only one file to save, no CSS and JavaScript). And if you need to print them, they look exactly the same as on-screen.
Posted Feb 6, 2015 6:10 UTC (Fri)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Posted Feb 6, 2015 11:25 UTC (Fri)
by mina86 (guest, #68442)
[Link]
Posted Feb 5, 2015 19:25 UTC (Thu)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Having (attempted to) read the parsing algorithm section of the HTML spec myself, you only really offer one choice there — and not everyone owns a colour teletext decoder these days.
Posted Feb 16, 2015 19:55 UTC (Mon)
by chojrak11 (guest, #52056)
[Link] (5 responses)
The only effect of such campaign is that in the future, when there will be really essential matter to raise for, nobody will be interested to hear you and will say "hey, those kids that don't like DOC files are fighting again. It must be something equally important.".
Posted Feb 17, 2015 2:09 UTC (Tue)
by ghane (guest, #1805)
[Link]
+1. Of course, the EU is not scarce on resources, so working on this will not impact its pursuit of Google for showing photos of me I prefer forgotten, or the Greek bailout, or ... .
> The only effect of such campaign is that in the future, when there will be really essential matter to raise for, nobody will be interested to hear you and will say "hey, those kids that don't like DOC files are fighting again. It must be something equally important.".
Seriously, I see this happening. I suppose this is a matter or principle, none of us is free in any way till the corner case is solved, no matter how corner or unlikely _that_ problem is. But some of us would like progress on what we can achieve now, and then fight for tomorrow.
Information does not want to be free, Information wants to lie back and bit-rot.
In jest, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
Posted Feb 17, 2015 10:29 UTC (Tue)
by lgeorget (guest, #99972)
[Link] (3 responses)
Although I can open MS Office documents using LibreOffice, they don't always display correctly. And editing and saving them back to MS Office format (using LibreOffice) can make them unusable by the person who sent them to me in the first place. Try putting a table in a docx file with a little fancy formatting for instance and see the difference between the original file and the file opened in LibreOffice and saved back to MS Office format.
Posted Feb 17, 2015 18:49 UTC (Tue)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 17, 2015 21:46 UTC (Tue)
by Jonno (subscriber, #49613)
[Link] (1 responses)
That is definitely a real problem, once it was bad enough that I failed a uni course thanks to it:
For a pair-work we were told to hand in the final report as a .doc file, but since neither of us had a Windows computer (I used Linux, she used Mac) and 16 out of 18 uni computer labs we had access to ran Sun Solaris with Star Office, we asked to hand in an sxw or pdf instead, but got told to use one of the two over-booked Windows labs at night instead...
We weren't happy about it, but didn't think making a point was important enough to fail a class for (even though faculty rules did prohibit courses from requiring the use any particular software without booking sufficient time in a computer lab providing it), so we ended up spending a night in the Windows lab to prepare the report.
However, it turned but her computer didn't have the same MS Office version as the computer lab, so we got a failing grade, with a note that the document was incomprehensible and that we should have used the Windows lab as she suggested. I got quite mad when I got that note, and sent her a very impolite email telling her that we had done that, and that she should have use it for grading us too! I also attached a new .doc file I had round-tripped through OpenOffice.org (as well as a pdf export from OpenOffice.org), and when she finally approved it a few weeks later she noted that the new .doc file I emailed her looked correct on her computer.
Since then I tend to make a ha-ha-only-serious joke that OpenOffice has better MS Word compatibility than MS Word...
Posted Feb 19, 2015 0:49 UTC (Thu)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOnWindows
> Why would we want to get Wine running in Windows? Newer versions of Windows fail to support old applications that are still supported by Wine. So Wine for Windows would supply useful backward compatibility for users.
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
Neither simple web pages nor simple text files are sufficient to express all forms of text-like content in a pleasantly readable manner.
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
PDFs are useful
PDFs are useful
PDFs are useful
MHTML is a single file.
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)
You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document' (Opensource.com)