feedback from ODF plugfest

[Hanssens Bart <Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be>]

Hi,

Some feedback from the ODF plugfest (was held in Brussels, April 19 and 20, hosted by Microsoft)
Most of the presentations can be found on http://plugfest.opendocsociety.org/doku.php?id=plugfests:201204_brussels:info

Michiel forward a mail from LetterGen listing a few issues with template engines / conversions https://open.nlnet.nl/pipermail/plugtest/2012-April/000608.html
Many of them are probably product-specific, but perhaps there are also issues with the ODF specification itself.

Jos van den Oever created a scenario on embedded fonts http://plugfest.opendocsociety.org/doku.php?id=scenarios:20120419:fontembedding

I created a scenario on validating the value of a spreadsheet cell, using a cell range on another sheet: http://plugfest.opendocsociety.org/doku.php?id=scenarios:20120419:cellvalidationrange

Eric Patterson created a presentation on the implementation of OpenFormula, and highlighted some issues (user-defined functions, year/leapyear 1900)
One version of an implementation actually failed to display this (correctly saved by Powerpoint) presentation properly, due to a conversion error. This was reported to the developers and fixed.

Microsoft announced support for ODF 1.2 in the next version of MS-Office, and the Calligra folks have released  a new version of their suite
Aside from the usual product updates, there was also a presentation by Dag Wieers on creating an ODF backend for AsciiDoc (http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/)
Svante presented Merge-Enabled Change Tracking (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/document.php?document_id=45795&wg_abbrev=office-collab)
Louis pointed out that there are currently no ODF editors (only viewers) for mobile devices like tablets

And once again, we've discussed creating test documents (both the tiny docs for testing a specific feature and complex real-life documents from users) and publishing them as a test suite.
Once again, we all agreed that this should be done, but it remains unclear who can and will provide the necessary resources to pull this off.
It is not really a technical issue (one does not have to be a rocket scientist to create / test ODF documents), nor an issue about logistics (it doesn't really matter where and how the documents are to be stored) but a financial (who will pay his employees or a 3rd party for creating test documents) and legal one (licenses, replacing copyrighted and confidential material etc)

Best regards

Bart