Msg: Re: Not entirely OT: ODT format

Speaking of this, a friend sent me his book in MS Word format. For fun (or what resembles it at my house), I opened and saved it in every format available on Open Office, plus WordPerfect.

What interesting (and I did it twice to make sure I wasn't dreaming), is that the ODT format was actually smaller than TXT. Short of compression, anyone know how that's possible?

----- Original Message ----
From: Patricia M. Godfrey
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 5:50:32 PM
Subject: Not entirely OT: ODT format

ODT is the famous "open document format" that the OASIS
consortium has been pushing. Now anything that annoys M$ I tend
to think has merit. And this is alleged to be based on XML. So I
assumed it would be open, not merely in the sense of not being
proprietary, but in the sense that it would be readable as plain
text (even if cluttered with formatting), as HTML, XML, and even
RTF are. But no such thing. Might as well be Lower Slobbovian or
Outer Impish.

After an attempt to export a Xy file (first to RTF, then import
that to Open Office Writer, then save as .ODT) yielded gibberish,
I tried creating a simple text file ("This is a test. Times
Roman, 12 point, italic and bold." and so on with a
few other fonts, including junicode, which I suspected might have
been the spanner in the works. The resulting ODT file, viewed in
a plain text editor (not Xy, for fear there might be some
high-order chars that could provoke trouble), has a couple of
snippets of plain text (apparently part of a doctype sort of
specification:
mimetypeapplication/vnd.oasis.opendocument.textPK), with some
other characters that when I tried to copy them into Tbird sent
it into a tizzy. There the find feature of the text editor could
find NOTHING like test, Times, italic, or any actual words in the
file. I'm not going to risk copying and pasting again, but where
the body of the text should have been was something like this:
cap E grave, cap AE ligature, i, script f, cap A umlaut, cap A
acute, lowercase d, hyphen, tilde, cap A something (too small for
me to see; maybe the overcircle?)... As I said, Outer Impish.

This is an open standard?

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx