Standards and Tech meeting point

After reading this post by Doug Mahugh, I tried some investigating on my own, wondering if I could find other interesting results. After spending some time without any success I finally found two tests that I wish to share with you :

Rotated text in a table cell

Here’s a table with the text of the header columns within a table rotated in OOo Writer (normally a feature uses often when creating a report that shows a lot of data or similar document to accommodate the space requirements of the columns).

Here’s the same table opened in Symphony :

Notice that the text of the header columns are not rotated (nor the header rows) which produces a table more difficult to read.

Here’s how I did that :

1. 1. Create a new blank document in Writer
   2. Create a table with 16 columns and 5 rows
   3. Place your data into the table
   4. Select the first row, right-click on the selected row, then select Table from the context menu
   5. Select the Text Flow tab, then choose the Right-to-left (vertical) option from the Text direction drop-down menu
   6. Select the first row and do the same (right-click, choose table, change Text direction to Right-to-left)
   7. Save the document
   8. Open this document in Lotus Symphony

Symbol Shapes

Create a new blank presentation in OOo Impress (v2.4.1) and add a smiley face symbol :

Then open it in Lotus Symphony :

What do you think it is? A smiley? Maybe you can imagine it’s a Bowling ball in the gutter (personnaly, my Bowling record is 165 points so no gutter for me :p).

How I did that ?

1. Create a new blank presentation in OOo Impress
2. Click the down arrow for Symbol Shapes (at the bottom of the screen) and select the Smiley Face symbol shape
   
3. Click on the presentation and drag to create a new smiley face symbol shape on the slide
4. Save the document
5. Open this document in Lotus Symphony

The idea behind these tests isn’t to tell you that OpenOffice .org or Symphony are bad implementations of ODF ; or that ODF is not sufficiently described in its  own specs. These tests are not those kinds of tests. If you read my last post concerning the ODF Implementation Notes release or the summary of my participation during the DDI event in Brussels, you may know that I love and trust the fact that if software companies exchange documentation, the software will be better tomorrow. The idea with these tests is just to highlight the fact that open standards are a very good point for the software market, but it’s not enough to allow developers to build compatible implementations. Indeed, we need two kind of documentation for software to be compatible with each other : specifications and implementation details. That’s exactly what Microsoft did several weeks ago by releasing the ODF Implementation Notes (and yesterday, by publishing Open XML ECMA-376 Implementation Notes!). Several years ago, I thought this was exactly the kind of documentation that Microsoft will never provide. Apparently, I was wrong ! Moreover Microsoft is the first to do it (except if you consider that source code is documentation!). Companies need to document their implementation, especially if it concerns open standards!