Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] The importance to users of documents looking the same

["Sam Johnston" <samj@samj.net>]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 6:17 PM,  <robert_weir@us.ibm.com> wrote:

"Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com> wrote on 06/18/2008 04:33:36 PM:

> 2008/6/18 David Gerard <dgerard@gmail.com>:
> > (at the risk of bludgeoning the point into the ground)
> >
> > Although actually defining what "layout perfect" means, users
> > certainly want it.
> <snip/>
>
>
> Agreed *some* users want it.
> It's not in the ODF standard.
> This group is concerned with compliance and interop to that standard
> hence layout perfect is out of scope for this TC

Never say never.  For example, I'm reading that OpenOffice 3.0 will have a features the will bundle a PDF document into an ODF packagage, in addition to the ODF content.  So pixel perfection, as well as editability.  A non-conventional way of achieving it, but it may prove to be effective.  In any case, something like that could be specified in a profile.

I've been thinking more about this suggestion (which if I recall correctly can be traced back to marbux) and the idea is growing on me, though it might want to be expanded to other standard formats/mime types too, like image/png for thumbnails, or text/plain for search. One could even have, for example, text/xml if one wanted to embed raw form data (eg SEC filings)... though there may be other more clever ways to achieve this.

Essentially we will have a scale with raw data editing at one end (eg form filler that spits out ODF) and typesetting at the other (eg pagemaker), with most falling in between (OOo, MS Office). The problem is that the embedded PDF representation will depend on the implementation, so taking a beautiful document carefully laid out in pagemaker and changing one character in OOo could cause a train wreck... I think a good way to position this feature is essentially 'PDF with source code' - if you touch it with the same implemtentation of the same or greater version then you can edit away, but if you open it in anohter it might want to save a copy for you.

Sam