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Document Liberation Project looking for developers

posted by mrbluze on Thursday April 03 2014, @03:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the hieroglyphics-was-too-easy dept.

moondrake writes:

A well-known problem in computing is the existence of data in outdated or inaccessible formats. A common reason for this inability to access data is the use of proprietary file-formats that result in vendor lock-in. At the Libregraphics conference in Germany, project leader Fridrich Strba announced the Document Liberation Project sponsored by The Document Foundation, which aims to attract open source developers to help provide tools for the conversion of files to the ODF ISO standard document format.

The project goals are:

  • to try to understand the structure and details of proprietary, undocumented file-formats
  • to use the understanding of the file-formats to implement libraries that are able to parse such documents and extract as much information as possible from them;
  • to use our existing framework to encode this data in a truly free and open standard file-format: the Open Document Format.

The project is associated with LibreOffice and is already helping compatibility with old formats in a number of FOSS projects.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by zafiro17 on Thursday April 03 2014, @07:13AM

    by zafiro17 (234) on Thursday April 03 2014, @07:13AM (#25450) Homepage

    You don't need ancient, pre-FOSS software to have a problem either. The new version of Mac Keynote doesn't have backward file compatibility.

    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5525581 [apple.com]

    http://presentationmagic.com/2013/10/26/its-not-al l-bad/ [presentationmagic.com]

    These two URLs should give you the gist of the problem, but in sum, people are having problems with files created just a year or two ago, which is frankly unacceptable. I know it's turned me off a product I liked until not long ago.

    --
    Soylent, Pipedot, Usenet's comp.misc. An embarrassment of riches.
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  • (Score: 2) by elf on Thursday April 03 2014, @08:27AM

    by elf (64) on Thursday April 03 2014, @08:27AM (#25483)

    They have already looked at that it seems

    http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libetonye k/ [freedesktop.org]

    (This was a link on the project website)

    I like the idea of this project and think it should be applied to lots of different types of files