Open Document Format in practice

WHO’S AFRAID OF ODT?

Article from Issue 75/2007
Author(s):

What happens when you feed an ODT document created with OpenOffice to a word processor like AbiWord, KWord, or Writely? Read on to find out.

Finally, we have an open standard for the exchange of data between office documents. The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is based on XML. You can use it to transport a text document (ODT), a drawing (ODG), a presen- tation (ODP), or a diagram (ODC) from OpenOffice to KOffice without any loss – at least in theory. Alternative word processors have not said much about OpenDocument Format thus far, and the implementation of this major standard is still in progress. Portability is a goal of ODT, and we wanted to learn how portable an ODT text document really is. To find out, we saved an ODT file in OpenOffice then opened it with tools such as AbiWord, KWord, and Google Docs.

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