The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take.

As Microsoft's Office Open XML document format remains in ISO limbo, a trio of countries are pushing forward an adoption of the alternative Open Document Format (ODF) instead, according to an ODF advocacy group.

Today is Document Freedom Day 2010. For the third time, groups all over the world are celebrating open document formats and Open Standards. They are raising awareness for how a technical issue impacts our day-to-day lives.

One of the great advantages of the OpenDocument format is that it is simply a zip file. You can unzip it with any archiver and take a look at the contents (which is a set of XML documents and associated data), change it, re-zip it and you have a new document. But, the OpenDocument Format specification, section has one little extra restriction when it comes to zip containers.

The Brasília Protocol (now translated to English) started the process of implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) within the Brazilian Government.

I’ve been so busy with other stuff that I’ve only peripherally been paying attention to an ongoing meme on the Internet about how the World Wide Web Consortium’s Common Document Format (CDF) had been identified by the OpenDocument Foundation as a superior document format to the OpenDocument Format that it had been backing for so long.

"The commonwealth of Massachusetts has done a 180 degree turn and decided to support Microsoft's Office Open XML format in addition to the OASIS Open Document Format."

An area in Impress can be an object or a selected region on the page. As an example open a new presentation and then add a 3D square to the page. While the object is highlighted choose Format-Area. When the dialog box opens you will see a lot of options are available, more than for the page format.

In the past, ITWire has been less than flattering over Microsoft’s OpenXML document format. Make no mistake, an open file format is definitely a must-have. Nevertheless, it exists so let’s be pragmatic: OpenXML can greatly bridge the gap between Windows and Linux. In fact, it can open up whole new opportunities for Linux coders to produce documents in a Microsoft-friendly format.