The selected standards, which are compatible with commonly used document applications, are:
- PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents
- Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents
The move supports the government's policy to create a level playing field for suppliers of all sizes, with its digital by default agenda on track to make cumulative savings of £1.2 billion in this Parliament for citizens, businesses and taxpayers.
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UK Government Selects Open Document Standards
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(Score: 1) by E_NOENT on Wednesday July 23 2014, @09:18AM
If I'm reading this right, this is a huge win for FOSS and sanity in general. It's been a good week [soylentnews.org] so far.
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 2, Informative) by panachocala on Wednesday July 23 2014, @09:44AM
Totally agree!
DocX has been such a fail for collaboration - even between Mac and Windows users in the same lab. Ditto for having non-compatible and (vaporware) compatible versions with the same name. It's a chore having colleagues send me .docx constantly and trying to read them in Office Starter, which disables 1/2 the features or have LibreOffice mangle them.
I'm praying for ODT to get enough traction that companies/universities/countries switch en masse to that format.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday July 23 2014, @09:52AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 23 2014, @10:07AM
Pdf 1/a is a good idea, but html? I guess that the bottom-end and the top-end system in use there will render some html in quite different ways. I'd specify some html version or subset.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @10:28AM
The important part of the government documents is the content, not the exact formatting. It normally doesn't matter if different HTML viewers show it differently, since the content will not be altered. And if it matters, you'll probably use PDF.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @11:43AM
PDF is only useful for print. Until we can buy monitors in at least 300 dpi A4 size, PDF will always be either unreadable or needing to continously scroll in all directions.
A format for screen display needs to be able to reflow to the current screen, and of the two formats, only HTML can do this.
My bank wants to send me my account statements as PDF files, A4 format with 10 lines of actual data per file. I can't import that into a spread sheet, and to find whatever payment is missing, I need to put 5-10 of these pages next to eachother in a readable size. I'm not buying a printer just so my stupid bank can save money on printing, so until they replace PDF with a sensible format, they can keep wasting postage on sending them via snail mail. That way, at least I can lay the pages out on my bed when looking for a missing payment.
An Adobe monopoly is no better than a Microsoft monopoly. On second thought, it's worse. I don't remember any Microsoft product being as bad as Adobe Reader.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @12:04PM
PDF/A is standardized. While Adobe Reader is by far the most common program for viewing them (for obvious reasons), it is definitely not the only one. Even Firefox comes with a built-in PDF viewer these days.
This doesn't, of course, invalidate your argument about the format. While in principle the PDF text can be reflowed (some ebook readers allow this), this won't help too much with preformatted content like tables. PDF is a layout/print format, not a content format.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @12:35PM
First, is this a real standard like HTML or C++, or a rubberstamp on a single vendors format like DOCX?
Second, when the alternatives fail to open, and the government tells me to use Adobe Reader, how much is a standard really worth? This happened here in Denmark, where the tax department used Javascript to ensure that only Adobe Reader was used to open the tax documents - though in that case, they still sent out paper versions to those who didn't download the tax documents by a specified date.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 23 2014, @01:33PM
I believe it's an open format, rather than a 'standard'. I don't think DocX is open, it's been reverse engineered.
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Friday July 25 2014, @03:05PM
No, Anonymous Coward had it right. DOCX is "Office Open XML", which is technically a standard (ISO/IEC 29500:2008) but in practice more like a rubberstamp on the format of a single vendor (Microsoft). You can read all about the controversial Standardization of Office Open XML [wikipedia.org]
As for Anonymous Coward's question, I've never personally heard any complaints about PDF along the same lines as DOCX, but I'm just a user. It did get me wondering whether gov.uk considered XPS [wikipedia.org] as an alternative to PDF. (Again, I have no knowledge regarding which would be preferable.)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:17PM
"PDF is a layout/print format, not a content format."
The battle still hasn't be won after 20 years WRT is a document a pile of contents with attached graphics arts, or is a document a pile of graphics art with attached content. And the fundamentalists on both sides demand uniformity. And most of the people in the battle aren't even remotely technical or even denigrate those with the ability to be technical as less than human. Its fun to watch.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Wednesday July 23 2014, @02:38PM
my bank did the same thing. I used google tesseract to reverse the perverse (!) data formatting...
If the bank put them in actual text format , use the wv/pdf tools (I use linux but they are FOSS), and extract the table data.
Mine was PHOTOCOPIED statements....wtf?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 23 2014, @10:34AM
Your government would like to remind you that while the format is open, the documents aren't. Rejoice in your oppression, losers.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Sunday August 10 2014, @05:04AM
1702845791×2