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Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jul 05, 2006 05:17 PM
from the odf-avalanche dept.
from the odf-avalanche dept.
Andy Updegrove writes "In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, of Germany's SoftMaker Software. Most people know about OpenOffice, StarOffice, and KOffice, the ODF poster child software suites. But there are also other products available as well, including this one, which bundles word processing and spreadsheet capabilities (with more modules on the way), runs on both Windows, Linux and mobile platforms, is designed for home users, is available on-line, is localized in many languages - and is dirt cheap, besides. It's also been selected by AMD for use in connection with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015. This interview series amply demonstrates how a useful standard - in this case ODF - can rapidly lead to the evolution of a rich and growing environment of compliant products, providing customers with variety, choice, price competition, and proprietary as well as open source product alternatives - in stark contrast to the situation that has prevailed in office suite software for the last many years."
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Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker
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Has anyone ever sent you an ODF document? (Score:4, Insightful)
If ODF is the reason for this new plethora of Office products, then why is
"Reading and Writing Word documents" the very first feature they all brag about.
As much as I wish ODF were widely used, the reason OOo, Star and the rest
exist is because of MS Office pricing. And these products do little to erode
the prevelance of the
me a document in anything other than Word. I'd be amazed if it happened.
Re:Has anyone ever sent you an ODF document? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, DOC is so engrained in our society that it will probably be around for another decade or more.
Catastrophe coming (Score:5, Insightful)
MS lost the war on the 3rd of May 2006. They just don't know it yet. ISO 26300 commoditises the format of word/spreadsheet/database files. It's a lynchpin which has just been pulled from MS Office (and therefore Windows). From now they're going to have to compete on price and merit.
Independants can now take advantage of that without having to run to keep up with the doc format, though that's still going to be an issue for a few years as ODF replaces doc as the standard format. That's the catastrophe, slow at first and accelerating out of control rapidly as the market does what governments couldn't.
Re:Catastrophe coming (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday February 10 2006, @02:51PM)
Why do you think it's being demanded by government offices all over the world so soon after becoming a draft?
Why, for the same reason that all government offices make any decision, of course: because it's the sensible, logical, cost-effective thing to do.
Re:Has anyone ever sent you an ODF document? (Score:4, Funny)
me a document in anything other than Word. I'd be amazed if it happened."
Nobody has ever sent you plain text? Nobody has ever sent you HTML (even in email?), nobody has ever sent you a PDF file?
I find that incredibly hard to believe.
I just don't get it... (Score:1)
Great product, but not quite ODF (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a big fan of TextMaker, which is SoftMaker's word processor. (I don't know the rest of the "suite").
But even though it is a really good word processor, it is hardly "ODF-compliant". In fact, this is my main problem with the program. By default, it stores documents in it's own proprietary format. It can save as MS-Word, which is what I do as a "lesser evil": it's also proprietary, but at least it is so widely used that I can expect to find converters for a long time. There is an
I don't want import/export filters. I want my word processor to use an open document format natively, by default. So I hope they will eventually completely switch to ODF.
Then of course, if the ODF is such a monstruosity as OpenOffice, I can understand why SoftMaker doesn't jump on the bandwagon... (yes, that's flamebait, but I mean it...:-)
An alternative would be to comletely open up the specification to their own format.
Re:Great product, but not quite ODF (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.softmaker.com/)
Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH
Hmm, it's the 49ers all over (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://code.google.com/p/nmod/)
Folks hear tell there's some erosion happening in the Microsoft foothills, and they want to stake a claim.
Next comes a marketplace awash with Wannabe Microsoft Office clones, all trying to eke some small living off the Open format that can be like the holy 'doc', and which they desperatelly hope is a way to get a decent market share. Sorry guys, the junkies aint switching, it's create an entirely new market or die.
I use ODF for *everything*, it's great, but these companies have got to realise, if all they can do is ape Office, then they're going against a battleship in a rowboat.
ODF brings a chance to create something new, a way to store documents in a unified format that means there will never be a place or time when they cannot be accessed. Not just the next few years, but centuries from now.
Microsoft have *never* offered this, unless the entire world plays their tune, and in spite of what you may have been told, there have been area's in computing where microsoft has never been able to venture. Without that they couldn't hope to dominate documents of all types, and you know they'd like to.
ODF can though, it has one huge advantage. Being an Open standard, it can be modified in full public view. Things will only ever be added if they enhance the document format itself, not to suite the perceived needs of a single vendor.
The only way to really exploit ODF is to break away from MSOffice like atributes, and start making something different and new.
Both of three things! (Score:3, Funny)
(http://knewter.wordpress.com/)
I found the article both informative, entertaining, and grammatically confused.
Apple: MIA (Score:4, Interesting)
I tries Microsoft Office out the other day (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday February 25 2003, @08:33PM)
Office opened up, I typed some characters... simple first steps. All seemed to be in order, so I go to try it out with some of my documents.
I go to open a document I have opened with a few other Word Processors.. nothing. Word can't read any of my standard ODF documents. All my other word processing software can read Word docs, but Microsoft can't read the basic, common denominator standard. So much for that.
So, on to spreadsheets. Open up an open document format spreadsheet with Excell. Excell somehow thinks this is a CSV formatted file of all things. I can't use any of my existing spreadsheets on this new software.
Rather than spen untold painful hours converting everything, I uninstalled office and installed OOo for Windows. It seems that MS has alot of work to do to bring their office suite up to par with current standards. As it is, it seems barely useable, *IF* you can get access to a Windows machine and only if that machine has MS Office installed, which is a fairly rare combination from where I stand. I wonder why I don't see more "Windows isn't ready for the desktop" comments, because from my vantage point, that's the impression I get every time I struggle to use the damn stuff.
Re:Maybe I' m just in a foul mood today, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday February 25 2003, @08:33PM)
GF's machine. She wanted access to some spreadsheets of mine and owns office which she normally uses on her laptop. In this case, I was using her desktop.
Needless to say. MS Office was not a workable solution because it didn't play nice with standards. Any number of alternative solutions were available, none of them Microsoft's. Other products that use a proprietary format can at least fall back to accepted standards as an alternative to work in normal environments... Microsoft Office does not. When even the small, open source products provide a trivial solution (or at least make a valiant attempt) to what in my mind is a fairly mundane computing task, I would expect a mature product to be up to the task. Microsoft's suite is not. For my purposes it is an inferior product, as I don't care how well it can intermix fonts and indent my letter, if I can't even read my letters, written to a standard, with their product, then their product sucks.
Microsoft to support ODF (just in) (Score:1)
(http://technoracle.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday August 16, @04:08PM)
Textmaker Platforms (Score:2)
OpenDocument is the way to go here... not some con (Score:1)
BTW, ODF is a file format (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:BTW, ODF is a file format (Score:5, Interesting)
when reading a document like ODF (and anything based on XML) you have to read the whole file in to understand any of it (i know this isn't exact but i don't want to type it all out) with a binary format like a doc file.. what you need first is first.. you can understand a section by jumping to it and geting just that portion instead of the whole thing..
it is the same with saving.. updating portions of the file instead of the whole thing.
ODF is nice in that it is human readable and easy to write code to read and write them BUT it is slow.. you can only optmize so much in code.. if your working with a bad layout you can only go so fast
MS has spent years optimizing the doc format ODF was not thought out for speed.
Re:BTW, ODF is a file format (Score:5, Informative)
And your proof for this assertion is...what?
Counter-proof: pull parsers and StAX [xml.com].
And your proof for this assertion is...what?
Counter-proof: ZIP files [google.com] have their table-of-contents at the end of the file.
And your proof for this assertion is...what?
And your proof for this assertion is...what?
And please don't cite that RAR vs. Solid RAR nonsense from your previous post. Your analysis of RAR vs. Solid RAR is spot-on, but you have not demonstrated how either RAR's or Solid RAR's performance can be used as a predictor of the performance of .doc or ODF or hamster wheels or anything else.
Re:BTW, ODF is a file format (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.earlconsult.com/)
Unless MS Office is a standard in the same sense as ODF now is, it's not as useful to me as ODF can be.
MS Office is only a standard in the sense that "everybody uses it"- here's a clue for you: not everybody does.
I don't. I don't send editable documents to people with formatting unless I'm needing
their editing input in the first place. I send PDF or PS files to people when I need a formally formatted
and printer ready document to go to people. Yes, MS Office is smaller. Yes, even ODF is smaller. What most people don't get is that it's less likely for someone to catch a Macro Trojan/Worm off of PDF files and they're honestly what you see is what you get- with an MS Office document, it's not guaranteed if you use a font they don't have on their machine- same goes with OpenOffice.
If it doesn't need formatting- it probably ought to be sent as a text email/file. If it does, and doesn't need editing, it probably needed to be sent as a PDF or similar. If it needs editing, you might want to consider something secure, something portable. MS Office formats are neither and can probably be said to not be so because they're little more than COM structured document stores.
Re:BTW, ODF is a file format (Score:4, Interesting)
BUT it is slow..
You are mistaken. Have you had a look at the bytes of a typical binary format such as MSDOC? It's mostly zeroes.
A text format with general purpose compression (as ODF is) can be considerably faster than a primitive binary "memory image". The reason is that that by far the biggest limiting factor is disk speed, not CPU, and if compression can reduce the disk size then the CPU needed to decode the text is not important. That's why read+decompress is often faster than read uncompressed.
M$ have highly optimized MSDOC read/write routines. OO's routines aren't highly optimized. The ODF document format is almost irrelevant.
Typical numbers. This [oasis-open.org] is 719 pages. It's about 0.5MB in both sxw and odt forms. A typical disk drive can read 10MB/s (just measured it). The entire document can be read in 50ms. Modern PC's have memory speeds of typically 1GB+/s [virgin.net]. The entire document can be read from memory in 500 microseconds.
This doesn't prove that the ODF document can be parsed quickly but unless the ODF document format is totally brain dead, it does strongly suggest that decoding is not a big deal time-wise. It's not as if serial decompression and parsing is a computationally challenging task. e.g. This [irrlicht3d.org] XML parser read from disk cache the entire uncompressed 5MB (400KB compressed) content.xml from the above document and processed it in 0.7s.
So please, stop spreading the all too common student excuses about primitive binary formats being magically faster. They may be but it's not automatic.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
WARNING: IGNORE PARENT (Score:1)
But the domain is www.docnotes.net, it was probably was intended to be some kind of gross medical pic.