[steering-discuss] Support for OOXML

Hi all,

I am about to answer to a letter from the Danish "Expert committee for open
standards" settled by the Danish Government.

I have been talking to Thorsten Behrens regarding the technical details. Now
I would like to discuss how I am going to express this in my answer. My
answer must be the truth and I can't risk to say one thing and then
something else is expressed in e.g., a press release later.

The question:
Which of the standards (by name and version number and amendment) are
supported in the application?

The technical answer I got from Thorsten:
1. ISO/IEC 29500:2008:OOXML Amendment 1 – LibreOffice is a conforming base
consumer according to ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008 §2.6, and a conforming producer
and consumer according to ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008 §2.2

My question is: Do we publicly and officially support ISO/IEC
29500:2008:OOXML?

Of cause if we do - then we do. But from a political point of view I would
rather write something about how we have not been able to support it
(several reason e.g., its a moving target, faulty and inconsistant etc.) but
we do what we can to support the file format implemented by MS Office 2007:
.docx.

Please - what do you think?

Cheers,
Leif Lodahl

Hello Leif,

Very interesting and important question. See below.

Hi all,

I am about to answer to a letter from the Danish "Expert committee
for open standards" settled by the Danish Government.

I have been talking to Thorsten Behrens regarding the technical
details. Now I would like to discuss how I am going to express this
in my answer. My answer must be the truth and I can't risk to say one
thing and then something else is expressed in e.g., a press release
later.

The question:
Which of the standards (by name and version number and amendment) are
supported in the application?

The technical answer I got from Thorsten:
1. ISO/IEC 29500:2008:OOXML Amendment 1 – LibreOffice is a conforming
base consumer according to ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008 §2.6, and a
conforming producer and consumer according to ISO/IEC 29500-4:2008
§2.2

If you remember well, pretty much anything can be declared a conforming
producer and consumer of the ISO 29500 format. It is also worth noting
that there is still no implementation of that standard, and it brings
me back to your second point below.

My question is: Do we publicly and officially support ISO/IEC
29500:2008:OOXML?

Of cause if we do - then we do. But from a political point of view I
would rather write something about how we have not been able to
support it (several reason e.g., its a moving target, faulty and
inconsistant etc.) but we do what we can to support the file format
implemented by MS Office 2007: .docx.

Please - what do you think?

You are not just right, you are also making an important point: LibO
and OOo (for that matter) are not supporters of ISO 29500; they
implement what they can understand from the proprietary file format of
MS Office 2007 and 2010 called OOXML.

Best,
Charles.