Re: [sca-assembly] Issue 238 proposal v2

[Anish Karmarkar <Anish.Karmarkar@oracle.com>]

On 11/19/2010 8:55 AM, Eric Johnson wrote:
>   Hi Mike,
>
> On 11/19/10 1:59 AM, Mike Edwards wrote:
>>
>> *One thing to consider seriously for the 1.2 version of the specs is
>> whether to do a*
>> *complete migration to OpenOffice from Word format. I note that most
>> of the newer*
>> *spec documents are in OO format.*
>>
>> *The time to make such a significant change is at the point where we
>> rebase 1.2 on*
>> *the final 1.1 spec.*
>>
>> *I'd appreciate knowing everyone's view on this. I personally find OO
>> easier to handle*
>> *today than Word, but I realize that may not be the general view.*
>
> +1.
>
> As I move between Mac, Windows and Linux, OpenOffice has the extreme
> advantage of being consistent across platforms.
>
> I'm sure folks from Oracle will object to switching to it, though ;-) .
>

Usually, I have to wait for my corporate overlords to let me know what 
position they would like me to espouse, before I comment. But in this 
case I'll go out on a limb here, deep down in the salt mines:

If/when we do this, we'll have to consistently use OOo, as there are 
sometimes suble differences in how OOo and Word (with the plugin) 
displays the doc (at least it did in the past). I'm fine with a switch 
as I'm comfortable editing with either tool. It'll involve some 
editorial work in getting a few things right (for example the normative 
statement color highlighting). I would also want to check that the HTML 
generated from OOo is not too different from the generated PDF -- 
perhaps the OASIS folks have already verified this. In the past (and 
things have improved significantly since the 2.0 release), the HTML 
generation was not acceptable.

Summary: I'm fine with the switch, if OOo can generate decent HTML.

-Anish
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