ODF and UOF

[Louis Suarez-Potts <Louis.Suarez-Potts@Sun.COM>]

I was just in China and discussed ODF and UOF harmonization as well as  
improved support for and implementation of UOF by OOo. At present, OOo  
supports it and since 3.x can save in UOF but evidently only  
imperfectly. The idea would be to improve this, in particular for  
ideographical scripts.
UOF, of course, is the government-mandated format for its documents.

So, this raises the set of questions below:

* Status of UOF as a specification?

	From conversations with the RedOffice team and with Peter in  
particular, UOF seems to be charging ahead and reaching 2.0. However,  
there seems to be little movement to relocate it to Oasis or to drive  
it to ISO standardization. Neither would directly enhance  
interoperability with ODF but either would likely raise the  
consciousness of the format among stakeholders.

* Status of ODF UOF harmonization?

	And, how desirable is this? At our meetings, we discussed the  
possibility of effectively merging the specifications, so that the  
elements missing in ODF but present in UOF and vice versa would be  
completed. Problem is, the basic layout of the page differs from  
format to format, so a simple cut and paste effort is not likely. My  
guess is that a native-code (C++) conversion might be required for this.

This effort might also have some other consequences, as it seems as if  
UOF is closer in its formatting logic to OOXML than ODF is. Thus,  
compatibility with OOXML might be--I have not checked this--improved  
by this work, providing it's reasonable.

* Logistics of any related work?

	That is, do we (stakeholders) have a good sense of how much work  
would be required to produce results that satisfy demanding enterprise  
users of UOF so that they are happy (or reasonable facsimile thereof)  
when they use OOo or its derivatives?

Thanks
louis








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