I'm with Richard, basically. It's XML and it's documented so it's not a
big deal, although you could argue that there was simply no need for
them to go a different way from Open Office (apart from a business
need). If there's not a converter to your taste then you can write one
with XSLT (and a lot of patience) - perhaps I should have a go at ODF to
TEILite. TEI has a lot going for it, as Richard says, but in the end the
most important thing is that the formats are open and flexible enough to
represent the structures you want to represent - although with word
processed documents there's inevitably also some presentation mixed in
with the structure.
Jeremy
Jeremy Ottevanger
Web Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London Group
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London. N1 7ED
Tel: 020 7410 2207
Fax: 020 7600 1058
Email: [log in to unmask]
www.museumoflondon.org.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Richard Light
Sent: 24 July 2007 08:13
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] ODF (ISO 26300) document format vs. OOXML
In message <[log in to unmask]>, J
Martin <[log in to unmask]> writes
>Anyway, back to the main question - ODF or OOXML for museums big or
>small (and other people too)?
Personally I don't feel too worried that there are two "competing" XML
frameworks for word-processed documents. It's a whole lot better than
having none, which was the position ten years ago. As users, very few
of us are going to actually delve into the raw XML and get excited about
the differences in encoding.
At a practical level, the fact that you can open MS Office documents in
Open Office and then save them in ODF format means that no-one is locked
into OOXML.
If you want your documentary resources to have long-term value, you
might want to look beyond this debate and think about formats such as
TEI (http://www.tei-c.org/).
One feature of Open Office is its ability to import and particularly
export in a number of formats. Sebastian Rahtz has developed filters
(http://www.tei-c.org/Software/teioo/) which allow Open Office (version
2.0) to open TEI XML documents, and save OO documents as TEI XML. I
have recently used the built-in ability of OO to export documents as
XHTML 1.0. It does this job rather well, generating a set of CSS styles
to retain the look of the original document.
So maybe the answer to your question is "neither"!
Richard Light
--
Richard Light
SGML/XML and Museum Information Consultancy [log in to unmask]
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