Author: Italo Vignoli

The Open Document Format website is managed by the OpenDoc Society. It is another useful resource for ODF advocates and especially for developers, as it offers an overview of dozens of libraries that make it easy to access content stored in Open Document Format.

The OpenDoc Society is also the organization behind ODF Plugfests, an ongoing series of vendor-neutral events, bringing together implementers and stakeholders of the standard. The goal is to achieve maximum interoperability by running scenario-based tests in a hands-on lab and discuss new and proposed features of the ODF specification.

The website of the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications Technical Committee is a fundamental resource for all people advocating the standard or deploying it within organizations of any size.

The home page provides the following contents: Announcements from the ODF TC, Overview of the standard document format, ODF TC subcommittees,
TC Liaisons, TC Tools and Approved Publications, Technical Work Produced by the Committee, External Resources, and Mailing Lists and Comments.

In addition, the home page provides links to the ODF TC Charter, Sun’s IPR Statement, FAQs, List of ODF TC Members, Email and Comment Archives, Results of Ballots, and Documents.

OASIS OpenDocument Essentials is a comprehensive book about the Open Document Format (ODF), published by O’Reilly under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

The book covers the following topics: the Open Document Format; the meta.xml, styles.xml, settings.xml, and content.xml Files; Text Document Basics; Text Documents, Advanced; Spreadsheets; Drawings; Presentations; and Charts.

The book helps to understand how to extract data from Open Document files or how to convert data to Open Document Format, or simply find out how the format works.

Open Document Format (ODF) is the native file format of LibreOffice, and of many other enterprise and personal productivity applications. ODF is an XML-based open standard file format for office documents, such as spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations. ODF is application-, platform-, and vendor-neutral, and thereby facilitates broad interoperability of office documents.

ODF is the only true standard file format for office documents, but is still lesser known than proprietary file formats, although countries such as UK, France, the Netherlands and Sweden in Europe and Taiwan in Asia have recognized it as the preferred file format for government documents. If you want to get an overview of ODF characteristics, this article from Rob Weir is one of the best starting points.

Rob Weir has been a leading member of the ODF Technical Committee (TC) at OASIS. In 2009, when he has published the article, he was co-chair of the OASIS ODF TC, as well as a member of the OASIS ODF Adoption TC and the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, and a representative in ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC34 for the US.

Andy Updegrove is a standards advocate, and has supported ODF since its inception. He is the author of Consortium Info, and of the related blog about standards.

Between November 2007 and January 2008 he has summarized in a series of five blog posts what he has defined “a standards war of truly epic proportions: the ongoing (at the time), ever expanding, still escalating conflict between ODF and OOXML, a battle that is playing out across five continents and in both the halls of government and the marketplace alike”.

It is an interesting reading, especially if you are involved in ODF today and miss the historic background:

Chapter 1: War of the Words (an eBook in Process)

Chapter 2: Products, Innovation and Market Share

Chapter 3: What a Difference a Decade Can Make

Chapter 4: Eric Kriss, Peter Quinn and the ETRM

Chapter 5: Open Standards