Re: [office] List Proposal Vote Deadline on Wednesday

[marbux <marbux@gmail.com>]

On 5/2/07, Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday 02 May 2007 21:32:53 marbux wrote:
> > > Bottom line; if there is a feature on ODF that WW doesn't support
> > > (like the concept of one style being reused for different lists) then
> > > don't use it and you can export just fine. Which means that loading
> > > and saving a WW doc can and will be loss-less if you write a good
> > > converter.
> >
> > I'm not competent to evaluate this. But I don't recall seeing anything
> > in the Sun/KOffice proposal specifying what that single key is to be.
> > It seems that what you propose might work if one were concerned only
> > with KOffice <> MSOffice round-tripping. But think of the more
> > involved use case where the same document gets handled by a bunch of
> > different apps, say for example a MSOffice <> KOffice <> OpenOffice <>
> > Google Docs round trip. In your scenario, does it matter that there is
> > no single key identified in the spec to be used by all apps?
> >
> > The situation is far more complex than writing a converter for going
> > between just two apps.
>
> That's a fair question; and I have to be honest that I have not looked at
> all the corner cases here.
> The concept I stated in the parent post is a simple one, though. It
> basically states that we avoid using a specific feature because WW
> doesn't have it. The following repeated loading and saving would perserve
> our list-information (as normal) which means that, indeed, the
> roundtripping via 3 different apps would still be possible. WW loading
> the ODF file would be able to get all its list info back.
>
> The moment it fails is if the user starts using a feature that WW does not
> have.  But I think that's a universal conversion problem and not very
> specific to lists.
>

But how is KWord to interpret the single key added by OOWriter if
there is no agreed functionality for that key? I.e., will KWord render
the list properly using OOo's arbitrary single key? And Zoho Office,
and Google Docs, etc.? And what if the last app in the chain handing
the document back to MS Office doesn't know what that single key
means?

Not trying to be difficult here. I'm just really concerned about
interoperability with MS Office. It matters whether ODF is just a
format for Sun and KOffice or is for everyone to use.

Best regards,

Marbux