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The Document Liberation Project

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  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

#2275 — The Document Liberation Project

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."

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#2283

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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#2284

On 2014-04-06, Randy Westlund <Vorzakir@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> 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.

I use Vim and write pretty much everything as a text file. I do use
Libre Office for much the same reasons you do. It truly does amaze me
that so many are unwilling to try out the free alternatives. It
certainly adds up over the years and then there are corporations that
have a ton of seats. Truly in their better interest to consider using
some of those funds normally reserved for licensing to be diverted into
development of the features they need from an open platform. They'd be
better off in the long run for it. 

-- 
Marek Novotny
A member of the Linux Foundation
http://www.linuxfoundation.org
git with the program

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#2297

Randy Westlund <Vorzakir@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> 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."

> ...
> 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?
> ...

For the same reason that so many non-technicals think that "the
internet" is "facebook".  They simply lack the knowledge to know any
better.

They think "document" means msword.

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#2287

RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> writes:
> 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. [...]

Kind of ironic that I just had to use an old version of LibreOffice to
recover the contents of a .sdw file, of all things...

-- 
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

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#2294

On 2014-04-06, Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> writes:
>> 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. [...]
>
> Kind of ironic that I just had to use an old version of LibreOffice to
> recover the contents of a .sdw file, of all things...

I had a similar problem with the then latest version of OpenOffice back in
2010, which had dropped support for the OOo V1 formats.  Perhaps I'd picked
up the wrong build but fortunately I had a slightly older version on my
laptop which could handle V1 and V2 formats.

-- 
Paul Sture

"In that case," said Napoleon, "let us wait twenty minutes; when the enemy
is making a false movement we must take good care not to interrupt him."

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#2343

> I had a similar problem with the then latest version of OpenOffice back in
> 2010, which had dropped support for the OOo V1 formats.  Perhaps I'd picked
> up the wrong build but fortunately I had a slightly older version on my
> laptop which could handle V1 and V2 formats.

An interesting follow-up, courtesy of LXer Linux News:

Feed: LXer Linux News
Title: ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words Chapter 5 - Open Standards
Author: bob@lxer.com
Link: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=200782
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:43:26 -0400

In which the ability of open standards to break even the most monolithic
IT monopolies is explained and explored

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