Why should I use the OpenDocument file format?

fuzymonkey · 2010-05-23 02:59:18

Forgive the noobish sounding question, because I'm definitely not a linux newbie anymore. The current xkcd (http://www.xkcd.com/743) got me thinking. I never had a problem with .doc files before, because everything can read them. And I'd never used .odt files before because I only recently discovered abiword-plugins lets me read .odt files in Abiword.

So, I'd like you to please convince me why I should use .odt files over .doc files. Thank you.

ngoonee · 2010-05-23 06:13:27

Why are you asking to be converted? Those who are meant to belong to the cult of .odt will find their hearts guiding them to the right place. Or, failing that, google would do the same.

zowki · 2010-05-23 07:51:20

The only reasons I can think of are for maximum compatibility with OpenOffice and the fact that it is a popular open standard.

Kiwi · 2010-05-23 08:43:47

Even Word, at least Word 2007, can open odt, iirc.

austin.rbn · 2010-05-23 09:08:39

Kiwi wrote:

Even Word, at least Word 2007, can open odt, iirc.

That's correct. It doesn't always display them perfectly (in my experience), but it's a supported format in Word 2007.

Cdh · 2010-05-23 09:43:20

fuzymonkey wrote:

I never had a problem with .doc files before, because everything can read them.

Oh, lucky one.
So you never got a complex document to print out where you first had to fix the page layout I guess.

skottish · 2010-05-23 15:23:22

The intent of the Open Document formats is to guarantee that the files will be readable forever. All of them are nothing more than compressed archives. You can open them up and see everything in the document including how it's formatted.

JohannesSM64 · 2010-05-23 15:49:03

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

toad · 2010-05-23 16:09:27

fuzymonkey wrote:

I never had a problem with .doc files before

Well, you _have_ been lucky. I had a more complex one crash on me every five minutes with alarming regularity. Granted, the last time I used M$ office and worked in the doc format was in 2001 and it was exactly that experience which made me look at alternatives (enter Ooo and subsequently Linux).

And apart from that, I have to send my work stuff in doc format - usually around 2 to 3MB in size. My odt files are 300 to 400kb max. Even if your odt gets corrupted you'll still be able to extract text from it. I think a doc will be less cooperative (but then again, I don't know). skottish put it nicely.

Basically, if doc works for you, fine. But sooner or later we will have you. Just remember, resistance is futile!

DeletedUser201201 · 2010-05-23 16:56:23

It's all about what works for you and the ethical boundaries you put on yourself. If we take your above post one can understand that you find *.doc both practical and ethical in contrast to *.odt, as such you should act appropriately.

If this, although, is just a short-term questioning of open formats then you should ask yourself on what place you stand on such matters.

However, I think that *.odt files are just the last thing one should look. OpenOffice is the cancer of free software and with each update becomes worst in every aspect (with the biggest one the stability). Also, the gui stays the same while the competitors (ie iWork, Office) continue to evolve. Something must be done.

fuzymonkey · 2010-05-23 17:58:29

Thanks skottish and toad, I didn't know that about .odt files before.

Anikom15 · 2010-05-23 23:22:49

I stick to pdf, and I do everything in tex.

3]) · 2010-05-23 23:32:07

You should be more apt to use .odt because:
a)more software will support that compared to the .doc format
b)it will remain around forever, anyone can look up the code to "read it"
c)if you use linux, it's the best way to save your documents
d)because it is cool to use .odt, ex: "what do you use?" -"o-d-t *puts sunglasses off* "

drcouzelis · 2010-05-24 00:47:37

fuzymonkey wrote:

I'd like you to please convince me why I should use .odt files over .doc files.

I guess I can't really stand ANY "Office" format. They seem so ridiculous to me. I think the thing that bugs me the most is that there is no difference between "writing" and "viewing" a document. I spend most of my time viewing other people's documents. I don't want to see the caret when I'm just viewing it. And when I close the document, you know how sometimes it will ask me if I want to save my changes even though I haven't made any changes? GRRRAAAARRR!

Anikom15 wrote:

I stick to pdf, and I do everything in tex.

I try to do this as well. LaTeX documents look SO much nicer to me. But mainly, I use plain text for most things. I think I'm the only one in my office that does.

skottish · 2010-05-24 01:14:57

PDF generated by LaTeX is certainly a great way to produce beautiful documents (many bonus points for using the microtype package), but it's hardly practical for the day-to-day sharing of editable files.

Spacenick · 2010-05-24 11:20:04

It is? At least I can put .tex files under git or svn and have all the beauty of revisions and so on. If that ain't good for collaboration I don't know what is.

Runiq · 2010-05-24 11:31:02

Spacenick wrote:

It is? At least I can put .tex files under git or svn and have all the beauty of revisions and so on. If that ain't good for collaboration I don't know what is.

It is, if and only if all of your fellow collaborators acutally know how to use LaTeX.

drcouzelis · 2010-05-24 11:57:21

I wonder if it would be worth it to teach people how to use LaTeX. I certainly don't think it's more complicated than writing a Word document in all cases. I can't believe how much time my coworkers spend try to "format" many of the 50+ page documents we work with. So often I hear problems like "This page break is wrong", "The index links are all messed up", "How do I get rid of this space?", and similar. Some of the time the answer is "We'll just leave it" or "I'll just re-write it". I thought all of those big fancy buttons on the top of the window were supposed to make writing a Word document easy? /rant

Say, is there an application that allows a person to right-click on a TEX file and "Open (as PDF)" and "Edit (as TEXT)", For any OS? You know, kind of like a JIT compiler.

...and is this too off-topic?

ilembitov · 2010-05-24 12:38:53

drcouzelis wrote:

I wonder if it would be worth it to teach people how to use LaTeX. I certainly don't think it's more complicated than writing a Word document in all cases. I can't believe how much time my coworkers spend try to "format" many of the 50+ page documents we work with. So often I hear problems like "This page break is wrong", "The index links are all messed up", "How do I get rid of this space?", and similar. Some of the time the answer is "We'll just leave it" or "I'll just re-write it". I thought all of those big fancy buttons on the top of the window were supposed to make writing a Word document easy? /rant
Say, is there an application that allows a person to right-click on a TEX file and "Open (as PDF)" and "Edit (as TEXT)", For any OS? You know, kind of like a JIT compiler.
...and is this too off-topic?

Well, I could share my experience here.

1. LaTeX is probably similar to Perl or Vim in terms of the learning curve. I mean, it's more "learn as you work" thing: LaTeX relies heavily on it CTAN repository and there are lots of different ways to do the same thing. Which is why all the guides are more like cookbooks with recipes how to perform different kind of tasks, not a 101 tutorial.

2. LaTeX is more oriented towards large documents, rather books than articles. Which means, one doesn't really need all of the features that LaTeX has to markup a document less than 50 pages. Most of the guides teach you how to work with books, while most of the users need to work with smaller texts. It's not a real problem for somebody who uses LaTeX for publishing his books to use it for smaller texts, but in other cases it's a bit challenging.

Whenever you grab a LaTeX guide, you can strip it off all the advanced topics and you'll find out that merely one or two chapters are needed for most WYSIWYG converts: document structure (the essential packages, etc), beautifiers (boldface, italic, underlining, etc), paragraph formatting (alignments, columns, etc) headers/titles, tables, images embedding and footnotes. All of this can be described in 50 pages at most, and that would be totally comprehensive.

So basically, one just needs a guide to LaTeX for word processing. Learning LaTeX for that purposes using publishing-oriented guides is really time consuming.

Perhaps, there is even some kind of a special macro for word processing, that has less features, but makes them easier to memorize and use - I don't know.

Actually, Pandoc's user guide could be a nice starting point, since pandoc has exactly the needed feature set. You should just expand it with some page properties (interlinear interval, page margins, etc), a review of the available tools for LaTeX (aucTeX, vim-latex, LyX, Kile, gummi, may be some popular extensions to Geany, Gedit, Kate), some popular Web resources (package reviews, tips-and-tricks wikis, etc) and some further reading.

gazj · 2010-05-24 16:49:03

The (new yay) British government is now strting to take the right direction.

The new government manifesto

"We will create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components".
"We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties"

Ranguvar · 2010-05-24 22:09:44

gazj wrote:

The (new yay) British government is now strting to take the right direction.
The new government manifesto
"We will create a level playing field for open-source software and will enable large ICT projects to be split into smaller components".
"We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties"

Now they're finally talking about open source in government...
Any bets on when they'll start doing stuff with open source in government, and not just saying they will?

Pardon my skepticism.. governments tend to be slooooww on the uptake with these sorts of things.

Anikom15 · 2010-05-24 23:40:34

Are there no WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX? I imagine one could be simple.

Ranguvar · 2010-05-25 01:03:02

Anikom15 wrote:

Are there no WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX? I imagine one could be simple.

Probably wouldn't be too hard... but wouldn't it be kind of self-defeating?

Runiq · 2010-05-25 01:11:58

Anikom15 wrote:

Are there no WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX? I imagine one could be simple.

There's lyx. I've seen a colleague use it at work… wasn't too impressed, but I guess it has its uses.

skottish · 2010-05-25 01:15:22

Anikom15 wrote:

Are there no WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX? I imagine one could be simple.

There's LyX which is pretty nice. But, what does a LaTeX GUI have to do with ODF?

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-23 02:59:18

Why should I use the OpenDocument file format?

#2 2010-05-23 06:13:27

Re: Why should I use the OpenDocument file format?

#3 2010-05-23 07:51:20

Re: Why should I use the OpenDocument file format?

#4 2010-05-23 08:43:47

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#5 2010-05-23 09:08:39

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#6 2010-05-23 09:43:20

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#7 2010-05-23 15:23:22

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#9 2010-05-23 16:09:27

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#10 2010-05-23 16:56:23

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#11 2010-05-23 17:58:29

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#12 2010-05-23 23:22:49

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#16 2010-05-24 11:20:04

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#18 2010-05-24 11:57:21

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#19 2010-05-24 12:38:53

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#20 2010-05-24 16:49:03

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#21 2010-05-24 22:09:44

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#22 2010-05-24 23:40:34

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#23 2010-05-25 01:03:02

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#25 2010-05-25 01:15:22

Re: Why should I use the OpenDocument file format?

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