Slide 5
Slide 5 text
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.