Peter,
----- Original Message ----
From: Peter Dolding <oiaohm@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] The importance to users of documents looking the same
> Most of the information to enforce some layout quality is in standard.
>
> Biggest issues is rounding how its handled is not covered.
I'm not sure "most of the information" is correct. As a simple example, ODF styles can have information about how wide paragraphs ought to be, and how high the text in them should be, but says little about word width. With that in mind, words could be different widths, causing different line
breaks and therefore different pagination. It's difficult to see how you could do deeper testing than what vendors are already going to be doing anyway, and from that point of view it doesn't seem to make sense to ask a TC to do that work also.
If you wanted to guarantee layout perfection, you wouldn't design a standard like ODF. You'd design it more like PDF or XPS, where the fixed positions of things are saved in the file. Those types of formats are extremely difficult to edit sensibly. It's swings and roundabouts.
As another example, soft page breaks were put into ODF 1.1 (?) because it was judged relatively difficult for most apps to be good enough at laying out ODF that working out which content was on which page was basically impossible. As I understand it, though, if you can repaginate you can throw away the soft page breaks - the standard explicitly says you can change the layout, even if the content remains the same.
Thanks