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Re: The Document Liberation Project

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On 2014-04-06, RS Wood wrote:
> From the «come, ye crusty formats of yesteryear» department:
> Title: The Document Foundation announces the Document Liberation Project
> Author:
> Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:04:04 -0400
> Link: http://lwn.net/Articles/592822/rss
>
> The Document Foundation has launched the Document Liberation Project. "The
> Document Liberation Project was created in the hope that it would empower
> individuals, organizations, and governments to recover their data from
> proprietary formats and provide a mechanism to transition that data into open
> file formats, returning effective control over the content from computer
> companies to the actual authors. Since the birth of LibreOffice in 2010,
> several community members have taken it upon themselves to improve format
> interoperability with proprietary applications. Encouraged by community
> interest, even from outside the LibreOffice project, the developers have so
> far provided read support for proprietary file formats including MS Visio,
> CorelDraw, MS Publisher, Apple Keynote, and a handful of different old
> Macintosh formats. In addition to LibreOffice, import libraries for these
> file formats are used by Abiword, Calligra, CorelDRAW File Viewer, Inkscape
> and Scribus."

While I write most of my own documents in LaTeX, I use LibreOffice
extensively for compatibility with other people, and I really
appreciate all the work these guys put in to supporting so many
formats.

I had a part time teaching job involving robotics and high school
students for a while.  I was required to submit my lesson plans in
.docx format so that the academic coordinator could leave
Office-style comments and return the document to me.  I'm not sure
what I would have done if LibreOffice didn't do such a good job with
it -- I had a few formatting issues for tables, but it was
manageable.

Aside from situations like that, I use it for people who haven't
yet figured out that they should convert to PDF before emailing (one
of my pet peeves -- if you want the document to look the same to who
ever opens it, /please/ put it in a *portable* format).

I don't understand why use of MS Word and MS Office products is
still so widespread -- is there something it can do that LibreOffice
and other free tools can't?  Why do businesses still pay for this?

I've been installing LibreOffice on my parent's new computers and
they love it because I made the ribbon go away.  They consider it
much more intuitive and easy to use than modern versions of Office.

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Thread

The Document Liberation Project RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-04-06 18:55 +0000
  Re: The Document Liberation Project Randy Westlund <Vorzakir@invalid.invalid> - 2014-04-06 19:21 +0000
    Re: The Document Liberation Project Marek Novotny <marek.novotny@hushmail.com> - 2014-04-06 14:26 -0500
    Re: The Document Liberation Project Rich <rich@example.com> - 2014-04-06 22:37 +0000
  Re: The Document Liberation Project Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk> - 2014-04-06 21:03 +0100
    Re: The Document Liberation Project Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-04-06 22:35 +0200
      Re: The Document Liberation Project RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-04-10 09:22 +0000

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