Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Do not support writing to OOXML format

Is anyone else getting the impression that this thread is polarising into US v rest of world?  

We've seen several people say that they have to accept what their customers provide and can't go 
back to the customer and say "can you provide this in another format?".  To me that's an attitude 
which I, rightly or wrongly, associate with the US.  In Europe we just fire away an email and get 
the file back again in another format.

And the other side of the coin, as others have said, outside the US more and more governments and 
non-US corporations are going over to FLOSS, whereas in the US, Microsoft is dominant.

If this is the case, we're never going to reach concensus on this topic.  Personally I've already 
signed up on Larry's side.  How about this for a compromise:

LibO comes with support to read docx (which it converts to ODT), but not to write it.  When someone 
tries to write it, a notice comes up saying in effect that docx is a broken format which even MS 
doesn't think much of, and that LibO, in the interests of free standards does not support it in 
vanilla mode.  However, click on this button and we'll save in doc format. One might even provide 
two buttons (plus Cancel), Save as doc and Save as odt.

But for the Americans and others who might want it, a downloadable module is provided which will 
write to docx format.  Then we turn the matter over to the educators, communicators and marketers 
to educate, communicate with and market to the North American continent.  Then those who want it 
can get docx compatibility, but they have to make an active choice and they're told it's risky and 
why.

//James
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