I've been quiet lately.
One of the questions I've been trying to get answered is whether
OpenOffice.org 2.0 has enough capability to create the kind of engineering
documents I've made with FrameMaker. This is important for finish the
numbering system standards for Traversal so people besides me can revise
them, and potentially for authoring OGP standards.
Debian finally has OOo 2.0 up in the Sid repository, and last
weekend I managed to install Sarge on the fast workstation and load the Sid
version of OOo on it. Played with it a couple of hours, trying to find out
whether the primitives are there to build a title block and sheet border.
The answer seems to be "yes". The features don't map one-to-one
with FM, and the user interface is a whole lot less logical, understandable,
and general, but the bottom line is that it can be done. Now I have to
spend some time with it to figure out just now.
So I'd like to raise the issue of document authoring tools again.
One of the big things that's happened since we last discussed the issue is
that Open Doc format has become a formal international standard, and several
word processors including OOo 2.0 have hastened to come into compliance.
Following the lead of the Massachusetts state government, I'd like to
suggest that our policy should be to approve formats, rather than the
application programs that generate them.
How about something like this?
OGP strongly prefers that standards, specifications, and other
documents which it issues for general public use be written in open standard
formats. Any format which has been approved as an open standard by the
Linux Documentation Project, or by any national or provincial/state
government, is presumed to be acceptable for OGP public documents unless
stated otherwise.
OGP understands that its members and outside contributors are
volunteers, and must have the freedom to use the tools they find convenient.
Material written for temporary or internal use, and not expected to be
revised or maintained, may be in any suitable format.
We respectfully request that e-mail and source code be in plain
text, if possible.
_______________________________________________
Open-graphics mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
