ODF

  • Bristol City Council & open standards – more

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech

    BCC logoFollowing the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light.

    It was all sparked by a discussion on Twitter between myself and Alex, a leading member of the Bristol & Bath Linux Users’ Group (BBLUG).

    It all revolved around what was really meant by the phrase “not fully digital” in respect of PDF files.

    My speculation was that if text documents are scanned, these are usually converted to image-based PDFs with which the screen readers used by blind and visually impaired people can have problems.

    It turned out this was a good point, but not the real reason.

    The latter was supplied by Gavin Beckett, BCC’s Chief Enterprise Architect, who actually responded to my FoI request. It seems Gavin’s main reason for describing PDFs as “not fully digital” is that PDF is basically an attempt to make electronic files emulate paper. The move by the council away from PDF to HTML when responding to citizens is that more mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) are now being used by the public to communicate with the local authority and the latter wishes to provide the same – i.e. “fully digital” experience to all.

    Finally Gavin promised to follow up with his colleagues my gripe about using MS formats for responding to FOI requests. He conceded this was one example where PDF would be better.

  • Recommended LibreOffice extension: MultiFormatSave

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    One of the great things about LibreOffice is the ability to customise and extend the software’s functionality by the use of extensions, for which there’s a dedicated website.

    If you use LibreOffice and need to save files in formats other than its native Open Document Formats (in my case, I work in Open Document format, but return work in MS Office formats and send out invoices as PDFs), then the MultiFormatSave extension is a really useful addition to your install since it can simultaneously save your file Open Document, MS Office and/or PDF formats as you choose.

    At the moment Open Document, MS Office 97 (.doc, .xls, etc.), MS Office 2007 XML (.docx, .xlsx, etc.) and PDF formats are supported.

    MultiFormatSave iconOnce installed via LibreOffice’s extension manager, MultiFormatSave adds a small icon – shown on the right – to the toolbars of your office suite’s component programs.

    Clicking on the icon will bring up the dialogue box shown below.

    MultiFormatSave dialogue box

    Saving in up to 3 formats at once is not only convenient, it can in my opinion help reduce one’s chances of falling victim to repetitive strain injury (RSI). 🙂

    More information on MultiFormatSave is available on the LibreOffice extensions site.

  • Response to open standards FoI request

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    A response has been received today to my FoI request to Bristol City Council on open standards (posts passim).

    The reply was received in a record 10 working days and reads as follows:

    Bristol City Council has been a long-term supporter of open standards wherever possible. We have frequently voluntarily adopted national government policy on open standards and open source, recognising the benefits of this approach.

    We adopted StarOffice in 2005 and moved to the Open Document Format as our standard for office productivity files at the point it was incorporated in the StarOffice / OpenOffice.org products. We had to move to Microsoft Office in 2010 due to the lack of standards support in the local government applications market, partly due to the fact that national government policy was not mandated at local level and therefore did not have the desired effects on the document standards context. However we retained the ability to create, open and collaborate on ODF by implementing LibreOffice alongside Microsoft Office on all council PCs. Therefore we are already capable of using ODF to collaborate on government documents.

    In terms of publishing government documents to citizens, we have historically used PDF, but are now attempting to replace all information, advice and guidance, and application forms with fully digital services. Over time this will replace old PDF documents with HTML. If there are documents that meet a user need to download and read offline, we can produce PDF/A format from the open source PDF Creator software that is also available on every council PC.

    I’m very pleased to note that BCC has LibreOffice installed on every council machine. They kept that quiet! Perhaps they’ll use it to send me replies to my FoI requests in future instead of the propensity to use MS Office formats. But just to make sure, I’ll include a plea for a reply in an open format in all my future requests. 🙂

    Read the original FoI request and response on WhatDoTheyKnow.

  • LibreOffice 4.4.1 – a vast improvement

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Yesterday my laptop’s install of LibreOffice was upgraded from version 4.3.3.2 (which is the latest version available for Debian Jessie) to the latest available version – LibreOffice 4.4.1.

    As there is no specific Debian repository that I can find for newer versions of LibreOffice, this process had to be done manually.

    The first stage was to download the zipped .deb packages required, i.e. the main installer, followed by the British English user interface. These were then unzipped in preparation for installation.

    However, before installation could take place, the older version of the suite had to be removed. This was done via the command line by opening a terminal and typing (as root):

    apt-get remove --purge libreoffice-core libreoffice-common

    Now the new version could be installed, once again via a terminal opened in the folder to which the main program’s .deb packages had been unzipped. This time the command – once more as root – is again straightforward:

     dpkg -i *

    Once the main program had been installed, the British English user interface could then be installed by running the dpkg command in the folder containing the relevant .deb, substituting the asterisk for the relevant package name.

    And that was it: I now had the latest release running.

    screenshot of LibreOffice About window

    As regards this release itself, The Document Foundation blog reported that over 100 bugs had been fixed compared with version 4.4.0.

    As someone whose days are spent slaving over a word processor and quite often has to use text effects such as subscript and superscript, I’m very pleased to see that these are included as standard on one of LibreOffice Writer’s toolbars.

    screenshot of LibreOffice Writer toolbar

    Putting on my linguist’s hat, another great addition to Writer’s toolbars is the special character menu shown by the capital L bar icon (Ł). This opens up the character selector – in my case kcharselect – for those special characters whose keyboard shortcuts one doesn’t happen to know. 🙂

    toolbar showing the capital L bar icon for special characters

    My overall impression is that LibreOffice 4.4.1 is the best LibreOffice to date. The redesigned toolbars will help make me more productive since I won’t need to go hunting around through menus quite so much, which can slow one down.

    My thanks to The Document Foundation and its developers for a great piece of work.

  • Bristol City Council asked about open standards

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    BCC logoWhenever I make a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Bristol City Council, the response invariably comes back in a proprietary Microsoft Office format (e.g. .docx, .xlsx, etc.), a practice I find less than satisfactory – not to say galling – as an advocate of free and open source software and open standards.

    That being so, the following FoI request has been made today to the council:

    Dear Bristol City Council,

    This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

    In July 2014, the Cabinet Office announced the adoption of open standards for document viewing and collaboration in central government. See https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs for details.

    The standards adopted are:

    – PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents;
    – Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents.

    What plans does Bristol City Council have to emulate central government’s move and when will similar open standards be adopted by the council for communicating and collaborating with citizens.

    Yours faithfully,

    Steve Woods

    Hopefully an answer will be forthcoming by Document Freedom Day 2015 (posts passim).

  • DFD2015 is 25th March

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    Document Freedom Day is an international day celebrating open standards and happens every year on the last Wednesday of March. This year it will take place on 25th March.

    It is a day to come together and raise attention towards the ever growing importance of Open Standards for all aspects of our digital communication and information accessibility.

    With the rise of new technologies and hardware, more and more communication is transmitted via electronic data. At the same time, more and more information is provided in digital formats or even created in digital format and will never be transferred to any analogue media. Various companies try to exploit these factors by offering communication or information services that use proprietary data formats to lock users into their software, hardware and services, so-called vendor lock-in.

    Celebrating Document Freedom Day is part of the fight against proprietary standards and vendor lock-in and a great opportunity to promote open standards, such as Open Document Format.

    Open standards are formats and protocols which everybody can use free of charge and restriction. They come with compatibility “built-in” – the way they work is shared publicly and any organisation can use them in their products and services without asking for permission. Open standards are the basis of cooperation and modern society: train tracks, power sockets and natural language are all examples of specifications that we all rely on and take for granted in daily life.

    DFD 2015 flyer

    In the past year there’s been a great boost to open standards in the United Kingdom with central government’s adoption of open standards for viewing or collaborating on government documents (posts passim).

    Now that Whitehall has adopted open standards, it’ll probably be a long battle to get local government to do likewise.

    For more information on Document Freedom Day 2015, visit Document Freedom.

  • LibreOffice and OpenOffice now available as web services on Firefox OS

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Mozilla blog has announced that rollApp, a US cloud provider, is making the free and open source LibreOffice and OpenOffice office packages available as web services on smartphones running Firefox OS. Apps for Android devices will follow.

    As regards LibreOffice, the packages available for Firefox OS and able to run in a web browser are Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (presentation) and Draw (drawing).

    OpenOffice screenshot

    The programs themselves run on the rollApp server as web services. Apps for Android smartphones and tablets should follow shortly. Dropbox, Google Drive und Microsoft’s OneDrive can be used as storasge locations. Along with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, 18 other programs can be run under Firefox OS using the rollApp service, which costs about $7 per month after a free trial period of 14 days has expired.

    In addition to the applications for Firefox OS, rollApp offers a wide range of other open source packages, including graphics packages such as Gimp and Inkscape, plus games.

  • “Most beautiful” LibreOffice 4.4 released

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4, billed as “the most beautiful LibreOffice ever“.

    This is the ninth major release of this leading free and open source office suite, with a significant number of design and user experience improvements.

    LibreOffice 4.4 infographic
    LibreOffice 4.4 infographic. Click on the image for the full-sized version.

    “LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever,” says design team leader Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky. “We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends.”

    LibreOffice 4.4 likewise offers several significant improvements in other areas, such as:

    • Support of OpenGL transitions in Windows and improved implementation based on the new OpenGL framework;
    • Digital signing of PDF files during the export process;
    • Installation of free fonts Carlito and Caladea to replace the proprietary Microsoft C-Fonts Calibri and Cambria, to get rid of font related problems while opening Microsoft’s proprietary format OOXML files;
    • The addition of several new default templates designed by volunteers;
    • Visual editing of Impress master pages, to remove unwanted elements, adding or hiding a level to the outline numbering and toggling bullet points on or off;
    • Better Track Changes – with new buttons in the Track Changes toolbar – and AutoCorrect features in Writer;
    • Improved import filters for Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Publisher and AbiWord files, as well as Microsoft Works spreadsheets;
    • New import filters for Adobe Pagemaker, MacDraw, MacDraw II and RagTime for Mac;
    • Greatly expanded support for media capabilities on each platform.

    A complete list of new and improved features is available in the release notes.

    LibreOffice 4.4 is available immediately for download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

    I’m looking forward to the new release being available in the Debian Jessie software repositories in the next few days. 🙂

  • City of Munich joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    TDF logoIt’s been announced that the City of Munich has joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF) the non-profit foundation steering the development of LibreOffice, the leading free and open source office productivity suite.

    On the TDF’s Advisory Board, Munich’s city council will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of Munich – the capital of Bavaria and Germany’s third largest city – launched the LiMux Project to migrate their software systems from closed-source, proprietary products to free and open-source software. The project was successfully completed in late 2013. The City of Munich has hosted a LibreOffice HackFest since 2011 to improve LibreOffice’s features aimed at enterprise environments.

    “The city of Munich is a healthy reference for every migration to free software and as such will add a significant value to our Advisory Board, where it will seat side by side with MIMO, representing the migration to LibreOffice of French Ministries, and with other companies providing value added services on top of LibreOffice,” says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Doctor Florian Haftmann will be introduced to other members of TDF Advisory Board during next planned meeting, on January 15, 2015.”

    With Munich’s addition, the TDF Advisory Board now has 17 members: AMD, CIB Software, City of Munich, CloudOn, Collabora, FrODeV (Freies Office Deutschland), FSF (Free Software Foundation), Google, Intel, ITOMIG, KACST (King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia), Lanedo, MIMO (Consortium of French Ministries), RedHat, SPI (Software in the Public Interest), Studio Storti and SUSE.

    Reposted from Bristol Wireless.

  • No immediate ODF support for mobile MS Office

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    ODF file iconThe Register reported yesterday on developments for MS Office on mobile devices (iOS, Android and Windows phones and tablets).

    Even though MS is reported to be going cross-platform “rather aggressively” in the words of Technical Product Manager Kaberi Chowdhury, there appears to be no corresponding effort to embrace open standards for mobile devices.

    As El Reg states:

    The mobile apps work well with Microsoft’s latest Office formats, such as docx and xlsx, but what about Open Document (ODF), as mandated by the UK government for use wherever possible?

    “We will bring support for ODF files to the iOS apps in a future update. Similarly, with the Android apps, we will deliver support in a future update following general availability. For the touch-optimized Office apps we’re delivering with Windows 10, we will have more to share soon,” said Chowdury.

    It’s hardly surprising Microsoft’s approach reeks of vendor lock-in. Office is after all its biggest cash cow after its insecure operating system.

Posts navigation