Tuesday, February 02, 2010

ODF Format for Danish Government Documents

According to Heise Media UK Ltd the Danish Parliament has agreed to use the Open Docuemnt Format (ODF) format for government documents, in preference to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML format). politiken.dk says that this will not come into effect until April 2011 and that PDF/A (the archival version of PDF) will also be used. There was some detailed and technical discussion in the Danish Parliament as to the compatibility of different versions of document standards. There is also a detailed report available on the problems of converting between the formats: "Document Interoperability: Open Document Format and Office Open XML " (Dr. Klaus-Peter Eckert, Jan Henrik Ziesing and Ucheoma Ishionwu, August 2009). This doesn't really say anything not known from previous comparisons: simple documents convert but there are some problems with more complex ones.

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