Darren New wrote:

> It seems either your organization needs the Word97 word break 
> algorithms, or it doesn't.
> 
> If it doesn't, what's the broughaha about OOXML not specifying what it 
> means?
> 
> If it does, either Open Office interprets it correctly, or it doesn't.
> 
> If Open Office interprets it correctly, what's the problem?
> 
> If Open Office doesn't interpret it correctly, you can't use Open Office 
> anyway, so you'd be unable to obey the government mandate to use open 
> software where available.
> 
> It seems like this whole "the spec is underspecified in small ways" 
> complaining is just really "we don't want MS to have a standard here 
> because the point was to keep people from using MS software."
> 
> There's never going to be enough information in the spec to reproduce 
> what the software does, or the spec would be bigger than the source code 
> of the software.
> 
> Something else nobody has answered for me: Does the ODF spec actually 
> specify the line breaking algorithms and how they're applied in 
> different settings?

You know what? PostScript is an open standard. Sure, it's not, to my 
knowledge, backed by any official standards body. But there is a written 
technical specification, available for free, and a large amount of 
software supports that standard. (And most of it isn't from Adobe, the 
creator of that standard.)

Identical remarks apply to PDF. Anybody who wants to can implement that 
standard, and lots of programs have done, and they all worth together. 
Not because these programs are "clones" of what Adobe has produced, but 
because they understand the same file format.

Note that there are no important parts of this standard that are not 
completely defined. (There is space for implementors to add their own 
extensions, but everything you need to be able to read and process the 
format is in the specs.)

If you write word processor documents in a *truely* open format, you can 
move it between different word processor applications. You can also (at 
least in principle) run an external spell checker over it, and have all 
sorts of other analysis and processing tools work on it. It's not like 
you're trying to "duplicate Word" by implementing the standard.

The trouble is, the M$ standard is something that looks like a standard, 
but would be really hard for anybody except M$ to implement. Things like 
using raw bitmaps instead of XML tags, because that happens to be how 
Word already works internally and it's easier not to change it. Things 
like controlling aspects of how Word displays the preview on screen.

Basically, the way the "standard" is written means that the only way to 
implement it is to duplicate Word. You can't [easily] implement it in a 
slightly different way. And that's not the point of standards...

Of course, a document format standard *already* exists. And it's pretty 
obvious why M$ wants to invent another one rather than use the existing 
one...

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