Introduction

[Chris Nokleberg <cnokleberg@tonicsystems.com>]

Hi everyone,

I've been meaning to introduce myself for a while. I recently joined the
TC as a representative Tonic Systems:
  http://tonicsystems.com/

We primarily provide enterprise developer tools for creating and
processing PowerPoint documents server-side. We also recently released a
free cross-platform PowerPoint viewer (written in Java). Our knowledge
of the PowerPoint file format is exclusively through reverse
engineering, so the value of open formats is pretty clear to me :-)

We are interested in adding support for OpenDocument formats to our
products, in particular:

- conversion between OpenDocument and PowerPoint 97-2007
- rendering of OpenDocument presentations

I have personally done significant work on the latter, but was stymied
by some ambiguities, underspecification, and interoperability issues in
the OpenDocument spec, primarily in the drawing portion. I posted most
of the issues to the opendocument-users list, but to date they have not
received much attention, so we decided that taking an active role in the
technical committee might be helpful.

For reference, here are links to the threads:
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00003.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00007.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00008.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00009.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00010.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00013.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00014.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00015.html
http://www.oasis-open.org/archives/opendocument-users/200601/msg00016.html

David Wheeler was also kind enough to forward my report on the
inconsistent specification of units to this list:
http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office/200602/msg00075.html

I'd appreciate some feedback, if not on the issues themselves then on
how best to proceed with getting them resolved.

Thanks,
Chris