ODF Toolkit Announced 71
Sweetshark writes "IBM and Sun joined at the 2008 OpenOffice.org conference in Beijing to announce the ODF Toolkit Union. The ODF Toolkit project will be independent of the development at OpenOffice.org, and will operate under the liberal Apache license. It goes from small tools that simplify using ODF in the software development process to large ODF Java and .NET libraries that can be used within other projects. 'The future of accessing and distributing software is here today,' said Michael Bemmer, senior director of Collaboration Engineering at Sun. 'It is no longer an acceptable business practice to have silos of office document data stored in proprietary formats. The industry has moved forward and is replacing the silos with business content, such as on-premise business applications, software solutions offered over the Internet and applications supported by mobile devices that are critical in Service Oriented Architectures.' Will this help ODF to make inroads in the business world after the successes on the desktops of users at home?"
Re:Beating Word will be hard (Score:3, Interesting)
IMHO, the enemy is the notion of using a glorified Paint for making structured documents. While I can't imagine everyone using TeX instead, there must be ways of promoting logical structure (e.g. with a TeX frontend like LyX) as opposed to WYSIWYG.
I think the problem of format X being tied to program Y is a symptom of this problem. Word processing has become monstrously complex, and while new features creep into the structure, people still expect a perfect preservation and control of the looks. Thus the logic of using the program becomes increasingly entangled with the storage format, as witnessed by Word documents being memory dumps.
Of course, a needless focus on the looks takes time and energy from the writing itself. It doesn't help that some universities here have ridiculously precise specifications for the looks of your final thesis.
So does this mean... (Score:4, Interesting)
that one day I will finally be able to use command line tools to work with odf documents -- like convert them to pdf or postscript, cause that would be awesome (it would also come about six years after I really really needed that kind of functionality, but oh well)
Use JOpenDocument or ApachePOI (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. The problem is there really is no working "ODF Toolkit". It's vaporware. Sun and IBM have been promising an odf toolkit since 2006, but to date nothing of any use has been produced. The current "ODF Toolkit" has virtually no documentation or example code, and is generally useless for importing data from an openoffice.org spreadsheet into a java program. If readers here don't believe me, they can go ahead and try it [odftoolkit.org] for themselves. The best thing available for odf handling in java is JOpenDocument [jopendocument.org]. Hopefully the "new and improved" odf toolkit project is now working with the JOpenDocument developers.
I don't know if they are, because I gave up waiting on Sun and IBM and decided to use the Apache POI [apache.org] libraries to read and write excel spreadsheets that can be created/opened by either MSOffice or OpenOffice.org.
Re:Use JOpenDocument or ApachePOI (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you sure about that? [cpan.org].
I know Perl is not considered sexy by the fad-hunting 'programmers' that haunt sites like this, but it works. And OpenOffice::OODoc is a very nice toolkit to programmatically create and manipulate ODF documents.
Mart