Good news that the Danish government has agreed to mandate the use of Open Document Format.
Last Friday, after four years of deliberation, representatives of all parties in the Danish parliament (Folketing) reached an agreement to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as their official format for saving documents from April 2011.
An interesting story of Norway enforcing public sector websites to use open formats, such as PDF and ODF for documents, in order to lower the bar for accessibility.
Taking effect from 1 January 2010 the content of public sector’s websites will be available in open formats. This new regulation will contribute to enhancing equal accessibility of users and suppliers to the information available on the websites of both central and local government.
This is something that Australia should also be doing.
I missed this previously, but Munich has finally switched over to exclusive use of ODF for documents, and PDF for non-editable documents.
The city administration’s standard desktops now consist of the free OpenOffice.org office suite, Mozilla’s Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client and several other open source applications, such as the GIMP image editor.
It looks like the Ecuadorian Institute of Standardisation has just unanimously approved the use of ODF in the country.
This comes after Brazil adopted ODF as their national standard last year and then their Ministry of Education developed a custom Linux distribution which is being rolled out to the country’s 52 million children.
Venezuela also adopted ODF as their national standard, as has Argentina and Uruguay (pdf).
Great stuff.
Ever had a PDF that you needed to change a few items on? There’s an extension for OpenOffice.org 3.0 which enables the importing of a PDF document into Draw and Impress (some of the OOo applications), where you can then perform basic editing.
OOo’s built-in export function means that you can then re-create the now updated PDF. The extension however, also enables the export of a hybrid-PDF which contains not only the new PDF but also an ODF version of the original file.
Could be handy.