Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker

Andy Updegrove writes "In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, of Germany's SoftMaker Software. Most people know about OpenOffice, StarOffice, and KOffice, the ODF poster child software suites. But there are also other products available as well, including this one, which bundles word processing and spreadsheet capabilities (with more modules on the way), runs on both Windows, Linux and mobile platforms, is designed for home users, is available on-line, is localized in many languages - and is dirt cheap, besides. It's also been selected by AMD for use in connection with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015. This interview series amply demonstrates how a useful standard - in this case ODF - can rapidly lead to the evolution of a rich and growing environment of compliant products, providing customers with variety, choice, price competition, and proprietary as well as open source product alternatives - in stark contrast to the situation that has prevailed in office suite software for the last many years."

Great product, but not quite ODF

[rduke15]

A very misleading article and submission.

I'm a big fan of TextMaker, which is SoftMaker's word processor. (I don't know the rest of the "suite").

But even though it is a really good word processor, it is hardly "ODF-compliant". In fact, this is my main problem with the program. By default, it stores documents in it's own proprietary format. It can save as MS-Word, which is what I do as a "lesser evil": it's also proprietary, but at least it is so widely used that I can expect to find converters for a long time. There is an .odt importer, but the exporter is still "in the works".

I don't want import/export filters. I want my word processor to use an open document format natively, by default. So I hope they will eventually completely switch to ODF.

Then of course, if the ODF is such a monstruosity as OpenOffice, I can understand why SoftMaker doesn't jump on the bandwagon... (yes, that's flamebait, but I mean it...:-)

An alternative would be to comletely open up the specification to their own format.

MOD PARENT DOWN!!!

[Joey Patterson]

Parent is a troll!!!

Re:BTW, ODF is a file format

[mmurphy000]

when reading a document like ODF (and anything based on XML) you have to read the whole file in to understand any of it

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

Counter-proof: pull parsers and StAX [xml.com].

with a binary format like a doc file.. what you need first is first..

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

Counter-proof: ZIP files [google.com] have their table-of-contents at the end of the file.

you can understand a section by jumping to it and geting just that portion instead of the whole thing

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

it is the same with saving.. updating portions of the file instead of the whole thing.

And your proof for this assertion is...what?

And please don't cite that RAR vs. Solid RAR nonsense from your previous post. Your analysis of RAR vs. Solid RAR is spot-on, but you have not demonstrated how either RAR's or Solid RAR's performance can be used as a predictor of the performance of .doc or ODF or hamster wheels or anything else.

Re:BTW, ODF is a file format

[Svartalf]

Reliability and consistency is first on my mind, followed up by speed.

Unless MS Office is a standard in the same sense as ODF now is, it's not as useful to me as ODF can be.
MS Office is only a standard in the sense that "everybody uses it"- here's a clue for you: not everybody does.

I don't. I don't send editable documents to people with formatting unless I'm needing
their editing input in the first place. I send PDF or PS files to people when I need a formally formatted
and printer ready document to go to people. Yes, MS Office is smaller. Yes, even ODF is smaller. What most people don't get is that it's less likely for someone to catch a Macro Trojan/Worm off of PDF files and they're honestly what you see is what you get- with an MS Office document, it's not guaranteed if you use a font they don't have on their machine- same goes with OpenOffice.

If it doesn't need formatting- it probably ought to be sent as a text email/file. If it does, and doesn't need editing, it probably needed to be sent as a PDF or similar. If it needs editing, you might want to consider something secure, something portable. MS Office formats are neither and can probably be said to not be so because they're little more than COM structured document stores.

Re:Great product, but not quite ODF

[martin-k]

We are already working on ODF export, and it will be featured in a free servicepack later this year. When this is done, OpenDocument will be added as one of the "default file formats", i.e., you can set TextMaker to create OpenDocument documents by default.

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH