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Subject: Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] Pixel Perfection (was: Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] (1)(f) and (1)(g) -- audience and working language)
2008/6/12 <robert_weir@us.ibm.com>: > For sake of argument it may help to think of 4 classes of document formats: > > Class 1 formats encoded just the text with no styles and no structure -- > ASCII text is the prime example. It says nothing about styles or layout. > How it renders depends entirely on the application you use to render it. > > Class 2 formats encode the text as well as the structure, perhaps with > semantics. XHTML Strict, for example, or DocBook. Again, no rendering > model is defined by the format, and what you see will depend on how your > application decides to style the document. > > Class 3 formats encode styles/attributes as well as structure, but have > implementation-dependent or platform-dependent rules for page layout, i.e., > how to deterime the XY position of each character, where line breaks will > occur, where page breaks will occur. These are often WYSIWYG-based, meaning > the print driver selected will influence the page margins and therefore the > layout. All office formats out there are in this class: Microsoft, > WordPerfect, Lotus and ODF. Class 3 should be some analogy of xsl-fo. Content derived from class two with formatting information present. No pagination, just style. Totally neutral wrt implementation. Your class 3 then becomes a class 4.5, i.e. moving towards class 4. > > Class 4 formats encode fixed-layout document. This means the text and > graphics is drawn at specific locations on the page, using a > device-independent coordinate system. Fonts are often embedded in the > document itself. Examples include Postscript, PDF and XPS. > > PDF is nice and has its place. But the fixed layout means you can only > rescale (zoom in and out) which makes it harder to use on devices with > different screen sizes or aspect ratios. And have you ever tried to write a > program that would insert a new paragraph into a PDF document? You would > need to re-layout the entire document, including line flows, page breaks, > page numbers, footnotes, orphan/widow control, etc. It really is not > practical. That doesn't mean PDF is bad. It just means that it serves a > different purpose. Unsure if this discussion is in scope, but I agree with the idea that PDF is 'different' to ODF (yeah, one letter :-) and should have no place in our testing. > > So, my advice would be for us to do what we can to improve ODF > interoperability, within the technical limitations that correspond to the > class of document format ODF is. I'm unsure how such classification is of use to this TC, but it makes sense. regards -- Dave Pawson XSLT XSL-FO FAQ. http://www.dpawson.co.uk
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