The aim of this project is a self-contained viewer application a la Acrobat Reader/Preview to allow OpenDocument formatted files to be browsed without the need for a full office suite. Presently it's a combination of XSL + XUL (IIRC) and, IMHO, is a good thing.
There are some other projects for similar things including Firefox browser extensions. In my opinion on the Mac where Safari is king standalone viewers are a much more effective way of spreading the love for all those people who want to view OpenDocument attachments and not download NeoOffice/OpenOffice.org (and might be a better "first response" to their queries as to whether you could send the document in classic MS Office format instead...I expect for a while OpenXML will get the same reception).
I think it's very interesting, since they are testing softwares that claim to handle odf files with a set of documents that are written according to the OpenDocument specification.
Not knowing anything about coding, it's strange, for me, that a document done with NeoOffice looks different if it's opened in koffice; but looking at the site I linked above it become understandable... OpenOffice.org, and so NeoOffice, doesn't adhere compleately to ODF specification, and the same, with much problems, happens for koffice.
So what happen, the odf file viewer will be done according to OpenDocument specification (and so we will have another software that will display differently an odf file) or will try to display correctly an odf file done with OpenOffice.org suite?
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 9:11 am Post subject:
Happy new year to you as well
I actually don't know much about adherence of different viewers and applications to the actual specification myself. The OASIS document is really large, so I guess it's not too surprising to find different interpretations of it.
Even if the documents themselves follow the specification, I think that there's a strong possibility that different applications may render things differently anyhow. From what I can tell, the specification does not embed actual font metrics within the document. It's up to the viewer/application to render the text as it sees fit. Fonts and font metrics will still be slightly different between platforms and may even be different between applications on the same platform due to slight application differences (particularly with things built on top of frameworks like OOo/Neo, KOffice, AbiWord).
Not sure if that explains it, but I believe there are formatting issues that go beyond just the document format
It's just to talk (this is a translation of an italian ideomatic phrase, so I don't know if it works in english), but my personal paper has an image, and I use to put a little table in the header of writer document I write for my customers.
Well, the viewer is not able to show any image and have lost all table borders...
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 10:16 am Post subject:
Ah yes, I see what you're getting at now...
Yes, the viewer right now is definitely preliminary I knew it couldn't handle columns but the images is kind of surprising. I guess it can still use some more work. If the rumor mills are right, .odt at least should be viewable in TextEdit for folks on Leopard, but I don't know if that's the case or not or how thorough the support might be. AbiWord offers .odt import, but it also has a tendency to futz up the layout as well and I don't know about images there either.
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