Re: [oiic-formation-discuss] My perspective. display perferct?

["David Gerard" <dgerard@gmail.com>]

2008/6/30 Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org>:

> Again, I think you are focussing too much on one small usecase of ODF. The
> Office-suite part.  There are a LOT more usecases where details like
> line-breaking is irrelevant and we should keep the balance.
> Or, in other words, if we focus completely on pixel precision I am sure that
> in 3 years our work is irrelevant and out of scope for most useages of ODF.
> Next to that, forcing the details of linebreaking to be in the spec is akin to
> having a hashing algorithm in OOXML, it just doesn't make much sense to
> reproduce ongoing research in a specification.
> I am wondering *why* you want to have something in there. Which probably means
> I am asking you the question; what do you think ODF is meant to do?


Because in the real world at present, users expect that when they make
a document on one system and load it onto another, the line breaks and
page breaks will be the same. It frustrates them deeply when this
expectation is broken.

You can say that's hard to do and that they're therefore wrong to
think this, but it's an interoperability example that real users
expect (as I've posted to the list before with examples - you said
you'd read all past messages). People do expect that text stays where
they put it, even if MS Office continually frustrates them on this
matter.


- d.