I’m wondering about this. In the past I wrote about the problems between KWord and OpenOffice.org about ODT handling.
Basically, a list created with KWord does not get loaded correctly with OpenOffice 2. The issue was identified before the final release, but was postponed to 2.0.1 release.
Okay, today I found OpenOffice 2.0.1 in portage, updated and tried, almost sure it was going to work…
Well it didn’t. OpenOffice.Org 2.0.1 is still unable to load KWord’s ODTs correctly, although they are compliant documents and they should be loaded fine. The issue in their issuezilla was verified and closed, but the problem persists.
This makes me think of two things: a) ODT is not a true solution at the moment, because its implementations does not really conform to a single standard, lists are handled in two different ways, and OpenOffice.Org, that should be the major ODT consumer and producer, is not able to manage one of the two b) the way OpenOffice.org issues are handled is faulty, they “verify” and “close” issues before the actual release, and then they are not actually fixed, it would be simpler if people could build some experimental version and verify and close bugs by themselves after the fix has been committed, but the way OpenOffice.Org is designed, it takes too much time to build to check that for a normal user, and it has to wait for the actual release.
Not like Gentoo’s way to handling bugs is perfect, sometimes I’d simply like to tell people to set verified all the bugs I resolve, so that I can close them later, but that’s probably not going to work that well 😐
Anyway, OpenOffice.Org still has troubles handling that particular feature, that’s not exactly a “small” feature; ODT is not yet ready to be the perfect interexchange format for every office suite.
And the ironic thing is that if Microsoft would have supported ODT, maybe they could have found a way to make them incompatible with everything else like they did with HTML.. are we going to use their format in the future, as actual working interexchange format, similarly how we currently use Samba to share data between Linux, FreeBSD and other L/OSS operating systems?
