yoush.homelinux.org

Those of us who use computer for some years, are aware of document file format problem. In short, it may be problematic to open a document created in environment other than you currently have.

So we all have been really excited about OpenDocument becoming an ISO standard. We believed that documents created in ODF-conforming text processor will be opened by other ODF-conforming text processor without issues.

However, let’s see how that works in practice.

Here is a very simple .odt file created in OpenOffice.org version 3.0.1, from debian experimental. Here is how it looks:

Nothing special. Just created new document, selected Text Body style, pressed bullet button, entered some text, pressed Enter, pressed backspace to get rid of bullet button on the second line (it’s an easy method to get second text paragraph corresponding to the same bullet item), enter some text, press enter. Then repeat all that second time.

This used to work in all versions of OpenOffice.org since the beginning. As well as in Micro$oft office software.

And here is how it looks when opened in OpenOffice.org version 2.4, from debian lenny:

You see, spacing is broken. This is exactly same problem we had with old text processors using non-standard file formats!

I may understand that newer version of OpenOffice.org contains new features, and not everything that it supports could be correctly imported in older version. However, document in question is very simple, and formatting it uses has been supported from the beginning! WTF? Perhaps all those talks abouth standard document format eliminating document import/export problems are just noice? Bad.

P.S. Just tried the reverse – create the same document in OOo2, then open in OOo3. Result was better – no visible difference. So at least if we only switch to later versions, we don’t get broken documents. Still bad, but not that bad.

Update: there was a reply on debian-openoffice mailing list stating that it is a somewhat known bug with OOo 2.4 being not ODF-conforming regarding bullets. Well, fixing bugs is good. However, there will always be bugs, and if fixes are going to break compatibility between text processors and document files, we are returning to the original situation. Still not good .