On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Hagar Delest <[email protected]>wrote:
> I think that documents need a format for the published status, something > not editable. What's wrong with PDF? PDF only stores the visual representation of a "page" (a printed page), in other words, can render text, and graphics, and tables... but for instance cannot contain a spreadhsheet with its embedded formulas, only the visual representation of the ¨finished¨ table with a given set of values and results, but not the calculations of each cell. So if you edit a PDF file with a nice table and change one value, the other values are not updated accordingly by the viewer, as the pdf reader has no idea whatsoever of what a spreadsheet is. ODF on the other hand can not only save the information of a table but also the spreadsheet formulas used to create such table and the results. So if you change a cell value, the entire spreadsheet data is recalculated. I think about it this way: PDF is for "dead" (not moving) data, a "final" destination for written data, ie, it replaces paper (that´s why PDF is still relevant in "print to pdf" scenarios), but not for data interchange and much less for evolving (changing) documents. FC
