Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> A New Dawn Rising For Open Documents?
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | With the filing of a new bill in Oregon, five US states have now
> | taken legislative action around adopting open documents. Still,
> | government agencies in the US lag way behind those in Europe in
> | moving beyond Windows lock-in.
> |
> | [...]
> |
> | "I expect that, five years from now, government requirements for
> | open formats will be near universal, either by law or by
> | agency-determined acquisition policies," he [Andy Updegrove]
> | told LinuxPlanet.
> `----
>
> http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/6375/1/
>
I think that it is important for users to just use ODF everywhere that it is
available, let people around you see just how good it is and it's
potential. I default my StarOffices to ODF (OpenOffice can do the same), I
do have to interact with MS users but it isn't hard to send a copy in their
format.
It isn't simply a revolutionary thing or a get at MS thing either. Once you
start using ODF you will see loads of advantages in the format. First, it
is a fast format, document rendering is very fast.
Document searches, what has Linux got that is better than on any other
platform? Powerfull commandline or scripted text searches, ODF is perfect
for that. How often have you set of a regex through a document folder only
to find that they are millions of answers for your particular search, none
of which are really what you were after, how can your regex be more
specific in an unknown document? Answer, by making use of tags, as you
would in xml or html searches.
For those of you that haven't had a good look at ODF yet let me send you to
this PDF document that describes the file format in detail. Whether your
commanline or programming skills are very basic or very advanced you will
quickly see many ways that this format can be of use in your own computing.
(this is a direct link to the PDF document)
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/12572/OpenDocument-v1.0-os.pdf
It is a long document, but don't see that as meaning a difficult document to
follow. They are a lot of attributes that have to be covered in detail for
developers. You will get a general idea of how it all works in the
introduction sections. Most people if they choose to use their own scripts
and code can get away with just a few general areas of the document tags.
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