Interoperability Rules to achieve Document Freedom

True document freedom can be achieved by using free software, open document standards, free fonts and standard document templates and styles. Users will have to learn a different process, in four easy steps, to improve the interoperability with other users, independently from the platform and the operating system.
A small effort, for a significant improvement, as the result will be true document freedom (and transparent interoperability).

Transcript

1. White Paper
   Interoperability Rules
   to achieve Document Freedom
   Interoperability and Document Freedom
   The large majority of personal computer users have never been taught to think in
   terms of interoperability, because interoperability would have been the tomb of
   proprietary desktop productivity suites.
   If users were free to choose the best tool for their needs - based mainly on the
   price/performance ratio - because document interoperability with other users was
   guaranteed by a true open standard format such as ODF, proprietary office suites
   would have never achieved the overwhelming market share they have reached.
   In a world of Open Standards, we would have had a different office suite
   marketplace, where competition would foster a true innovation process, based on
   useful features and not on a lock-in strategy based on document pseudo-standards,
   proprietary fonts and obfuscated operating system features.
   In fact, when document interoperability was based on the exchange of printed
   documents, there were a much more diverse set of products and fierce competition
   in the market in many geographies (for example, WordPerfect and Lotus 123 were
   leading the US market for word processors and spreadsheets).
   With the growth of the graphical desktop environment and the opportunity of
   exchanging digital documents, users of desktop productivity suites were "gently"
   nudged in one direction, with the result that in less than a decade, this extremely
   smart strategy gave the world a single, dominant, proprietary office suite and
   document format.
   Luckily, Sun's OpenOffice.org and then its independent successor LibreOffice -
   managed by The Document Foundation - have made a dent into that market share
   by providing an improved level of compatibility with the most popular document
   formats.
   On one side, this has allowed an increasing number of large organizations to
   migrate to free office suites. Amongst them, the French Government with 500,000
   PCs, Comunitat Valenciana with 120,000 PCs, the Dutch Ministry of Defense
   with 45,000 PCs, and the Hospitals of Copenhagen with 25,000 PCs (to name just
   a few).
   On the other side, this has forced proprietary vendors to develop methods and
   technologies which make it increasingly difficult or just frustrating to work with
   free office suites. None of these technologies was intended to improve the user
   experience or software features.
   

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2. White Paper
   All these methods and technologies have been introduced over the course of time
   into proprietary office suites: a "ribbon" user interface, proprietary fonts, and a
   pseudo-standard document format.
   The ribbon user interface, which is perceived by many as more awkward and less
   productive than the traditional menu-based user interface, has the aim of making
   OpenOffice and LibreOffice look "different".
   In addition, it consumes a significant percentage of a personal computer's scarce
   vertical screen space, leaving a smaller space for editing than a vertical sidebar.
   Proprietary fonts - the new default for proprietary office suites - can make
   documents look significantly different when opened with a free office suite, as
   they have different sizes and metrics. Although there have been advances in this
   area thanks to Google and RedHat, users complain for the visual difference even
   if contents are the same.
   The pseudo-standard document format, which is approved by ISO but shares
   many characteristics with proprietary and obfuscated formats, is the icing on the
   cake of (non)interoperability.
   In fact, it has been released in four different versions over three proprietary office
   suite releases, and only in 2013 it has been provided according to the ISO standard
   specifications, which are different from every previous "transitional" version.
   Free office suites like LibreOffice, which support this pseudo-standard, have an
   hard time in trying to reproduce the different behaviours of such a moving target.
   Unfortunately, users do not realize that several interoperability problems are due
   to inconsistencies in the pseudo-standard document format, and not to the free
   office suite.
   In a world of Open Standards, a document freedom oriented strategy should allow
   users to control all the factors which make the document easily and transparently
   interoperable with other users. In fact, document interoperability should be a no
   brainer.
   Achieving Document Interoperability in Four Easy Steps
   In order to achieve document freedom, we must learn to produce interoperable
   documents. Unfortunately, this means that we have to review most of our editing
   habits, and start thinking about several details which make a difference: the office
   suite, the document format and the fonts.
   At the end, we will realize that if we start thinking about interoperability when we
   create a new document, we will eventually be able to exchange transparently any
   of such documents with any other user.
   

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3. White Paper
   Use LibreOffice
   Today, LibreOffice is the best available option for true document freedom, as it is
   the only free office suite independent from external influence. In fact, other office
   suites, although open source, are under the umbrella of either another open source
   project or a large corporation.
   LibreOffice is developed by one of the largest free software communities, under
   the umbrella of The Document Foundation. TDF is a German based, independent,
   not for profit entity - supported by governments, corporations and small software
   companies - which is overseeing and coordinating LibreOffice related activities.
   LibreOffice is released under a copyleft license: a key asset of the software.
   Copyleft licenses offer several advantages over other OSI approved licenses as
   they create an environment where corporate sponsored developers and volunteer
   developers can co-operate, without the risk of seeing their contributions used to
   create a proprietary software package.
   Thanks to the positive effects of the copyleft license, the LibreOffice hacker
   community has been growing steadily and - although based on a majority of pure
   volunteers - is comparable in size with the largest open source software projects.
   This safeguard the independence and the future of LibreOffice as a free office
   suite capable of competing with proprietary offerings.
   Use ODF
   ODF is the acronym of Open Document Format for Office Applications, also
   known as OpenDocument. It is an XML-based file format for office documents,
   which was developed with the aim of providing a standard file format for desktop
   productivity.
   ODF was developed by a technical committee in the Organization for the
   Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) industry consortium,
   based on Sun's specification for OpenOffice XML, the default file format used by
   the "parent" of LibreOffice. In 2006, at the end of a lengthy review process, ODF
   was approved as an ISO/IEC International Standard under the name ISO/IEC
   26300:2006.
   ODF is recognized and supported as a document standard by several governments,
   companies, organizations and software products. For example: NATO with its 26
   members uses ODF as a standard for documents.
   ODF is the native file format of LibreOffice, and of many free office suites and
   applications: AbiWord, Apache OpenOffice, Calligra, GNUmeric and NeoOffice.
   In addition, ODF is supported by proprietary office suites and applications.
   An open standard for office documents represents a dramatic improvement over
   

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4. White Paper
   legacy proprietary file formats or pseudo-standards.
   In fact, an open standard protects users against the effects of vendor lock-in,
   because the availability of the format specifications and the fact that the standard
   is managed by a truly independent organization such as OASIS foster document
   freedom.
   ODF documents - ODT text documents, ODS spreadsheets and ODP presentations
   - will always be free and accessible for everyone, because they are based on open
   specifications. This means that implementing ODF is a straightforward process,
   which provides predictable and consistent results independently from the software
   (because developers can rely on the same public specifications, and can leverage
   the availability of the source code).
   Trying to simplify the concept, writing an ODF document is easy - and therefore
   the result is predictable - because developers can access the same specifications,
   which are easy to understand, and can rely on the same tools. Therefore, it will
   always be possible to open an ODF document (even a very old one).
   Of course, in order to protect users freedom, LibreOffice reads and writes - often
   perfectly - every flavour of office suite documents, from the legacy proprietary to
   the current pseudo-standard. These office formats, though, should be used only to
   exchange documents with other users, and not to store information.
   Use Free Fonts
   LibreOffice uses free fonts, which can be installed on any personal computer and
   distributed without any limitation, in order to ensure the visual consistency of
   documents between different hardware platforms and operating systems.
   A word processing document or a presentation created with LibreOffice can be
   opened by any other personal computer using LibreOffice, independently from the
   platform or the operating system. The two documents will look identical, because
   the fonts will be the same (while the software will take care of all other details,
   such as margins, alignments and line spacings).
   On the contrary, proprietary office suites use their own fonts as defaults for new
   documents. These proprietary fonts are commonly replaced with similar but
   metrically different fonts when opened by LibreOffice or any other software. This
   can give a visually different result from the original, which will generate an issue
   about interoperability (even if document contents are preserved).
   Summarizing, proprietary fonts create create an artificial compatibility issue
   between otherwise identical documents, as the perception of a visual difference
   will overcome the fact that all content is preserved.
   Combined with the ODF standard document format, free fonts will preserve not
   

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5. White Paper
   only the contents but also the visual appearance, for the foreseeable future. There
   are several sources for free fonts, which offer a large selection able to fulfil every
   personal taste: Google Font, with over 630 font families; Open Font Library, with
   almost 400 font libraries; and Font Squirrel, with a very large selection.
   Summarizing, free fonts improve interoperability, and increase document fidelity.
   So, their deployment should become a habit for every personal computer user.
   Use Templates and Styles
   Templates and Styles are the last component of a perfectly interoperable
   document, because they help users in producing standard compliant XML tags to
   describe the different elements (like titles, subtitles, headings, paragraphs, headers
   and footers, page numbers, cell contents, etc.). A standard compliant XML tag will
   be extremely easy to reproduce by the receiving software, and this will result in a
   document which is identical to the original one.
   In fact, every element of the document has a tag such as or , which
   describes the function. In addition, there are other tags which describe the font and
   the size, and other attributes such as the character weight (regular, bold or italic)
   and the line alignment. If a user deletes a Template or a Style element, he will also
   delete the associated XML tag, which will be replaced by a generic tag.
   The lack of the right XML tag will represent a problem for the receiving software,
   which will try to interpret the generic tag instead of reproducing the right one. The
   result will be a document which might - or might not, according to the behaviour
   of the software - be different from the original.
   Conclusion
   True document freedom can be achieved by using free software, open document
   standards, free fonts and standard document templates and styles. Users will have
   to learn a different process, in four easy steps, to improve the interoperability with
   other users, independently from the platform and the operating system
   A small effort, for a significant improvement, as the result will be true document
   freedom (and transparent interoperability).
   This white paper is licensed under a Creative Commons
   Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
   

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