Open XML translator for Word available
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(InfoWorld) - Companies have completed the first phase of a Microsoft-sponsored project to create software that can convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and Open Document Format for Office Applications file formats. The Open XML Translator is now available for download in version 1.0 from SourceForge.net, a site that acts as an online repository for open-source projects. The software also can be found on Microsoft's Web site here and here. Microsoft funded the work on the translator, but did not contribute any code to the project, said Jason Matusow, senior director of intellectual property and interoperability at Microsoft. The company provided architectural guidance and management to the project, he said. A French company called CleverAge contributed the code and built most of the Open XML Translator, while Aztecsoft in India and Dialogika in Germany did the quality assurance and testing. The Open XML Translator allows Microsoft Word documents based on Open XML to be translated into ODF and vice versa, Matusow said. Once downloaded, it can be used as a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2007, the documents of which are based on Open XML. Developers also can build it into software they are developing. The Open XML Translator for Word documents is the first phase of the project. The team is currently working on translation between ODF and Open XML for spreadsheets written in Microsoft Excel 2007 and presentations developed in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, Matusow said. Much has been made of the fact that MicrosoftÂ did not provide native supportÂ in Microsoft Office 2007 for ODF, though it provides support for 30 other file formats and uses Open XML as the default document file format. Matusow defends that decision by saying Microsoft tries to meet its customers' wishes, and there was no customer demand for ODF -- largely supported by rivals IBM and Sun Microsystems -- when development on Office 2007 began. IBM and Sun both use ODF as the default file format in their own rivals to the Microsoft Office suite. "A standard is about a stack of paper -- market adoption is the ultimate driver of activity," Matusow said. "What gets built and used is the defining element. That's why we look at the customer discussion as being so important." However, government customers that may be required to use only industry-standard technologies in their IT infrastructure requested that Microsoft provide a way to translate between Open XML and ODF.Â ODF recently was approvedÂ by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as a global standard, while Open XML is awaiting approval. Matusow said the reason Microsoft let third parties be the primary creators and caretakers of the Open XML Translator is because of the input of government customers who wanted Microsoft to provide a free, open way to translate between ODF and Open XML -- one that was not strictly overseen by Microsoft but was more of a community effort. To its credit, Microsoft did try to include native support for another company's document format -- a standard implementation of Adobe Systems Inc.'s PDF -- in Office 2007, but Adobe balked at the idea and asked Microsoft to pull that support, which it did. Adobe recently submitted PDF to the ISO for global standardization, and Matusow said Microsoft would again be "open to conversation" with Adobe about including PDF as a native file format in a future version of Office.
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(InfoWorld) - AÂ word processor developed by the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and based on OpenOffice.org 2.0 could make life easier for bilingual communities around the world. The translation software, Agored,Â which means open in Welsh, contains prominent buttons to switch the language of the user interface between English and Welsh. Similar buttons change the language used by the spelling checker, either for the whole document or for one paragraph. There's already a Welsh-language version of OpenOffice, but the application interface only shows one language at a time, and changing it involves delving into the menus. Much of the bilingual functionality that Agored adds to the interface is already present in OpenOffice, but not readily accessible, said David Chan, a programmer who worked on the project. Agored makes it easier for users to sit down in front of a computer and switch the application to their strongest language, he said. Wales, one of the four constituent nations of the U.K., has two official languages with equal status, Welsh and English, and local government bodies and other public organizations must issue documents in both languages. Almost one in four of the country's 2.8 million inhabitants speak, read or write Welsh, according to the latest national census , but there are few exclusively Welsh-speaking communities left. "Those people need bilingual software, not Welsh software," Chan said. In addition to the coding, a lot of work went into the translation of Agored's menu items, dialogs and numerous help files -- around half a million words in all, according to Diarmuid Johnson, who worked on the translation. The University of Wales at Aberystwyth developed Agored with funding from the National Assembly for Wales, the Welsh public television channel S4C and the Welsh Language Board. Some of the computer-related terms had already been defined by the Welsh Language Board in a joint project with Microsoft Corp. in 2004 that led to the creation of a Welsh language interface pack for Office 2003 , Johnson said. In the three days following Agored's release on Nov. 16, it was downloaded 200 times, Chan said. The functions that Agored adds to OpenOffice could interest many more people than that, though. Chan said the project team took care to make their code changes useful to other bilingual communities, groups that could include speakers of English and Irish Gaelic in Ireland; of French and Dutch in the Belgian capital of Brussels; of French and German in Switzerland, and of Basque and Spanish or of Catalan and Spanish in Spain. Chan said he had already been contacted by Catalan speakers during Agored's development. Speakers of Catalan and Welsh have another IT interest in common: Internet top-level domains (TLDs) to promote their languages and cultures. Domain name registry FundaciÃ³ puntCAT won approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create the dot-cat TLD for the Catalan linguistic and cultural community in September 2005. One year later, FundaciÃ³ puntCAT said it had registered 17,500 dot-cat domains. Inspired by the Catalan success, a Welsh group has launched a campaign for a Welsh TLD , dot-cym. (The y in cym rhymes with the "u" in "put" or the "oo" in "hood.") The campaigners hope that dot-cym will stimulate the use of Welsh on the Web in the same way that the creation of the dot-cat TLD led to the creation of sites written in the Catalan language. Earlier this month, members of the National Assembly of Wales voted to support the dot-cym campaign.
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Microsoft is calling IBM out over its opposition to Office Open XML, saying it is attempting to create a movement to prevent ISO standardization of the format. In an open letter posted to its Web site, Microsoft claims IBM is trying to limit choice by pushing the OpenDocument Format.
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Microsoft's Open XML format has won ECMA approval as a standard, giving Redmond, so often the opponent of open-source software, a better footing to compete with OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument Format (ODF).
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(InfoWorld) - Standards body Ecma International expects to publish the final draft of the Office Open XML file formats specification proposed by Microsoft Corp. as early as Monday, ahead of a formal vote to adopt the specification as a standard in December. Governments are taking an interest in open-standard document formats as a way to guarantee access to legacy public information, and to avoid dependence on developers of proprietary software. Denmark's government voted in June to mandate the use of open-standard document formats in central government from Jan. 1, 2008. For now, five ministries are testing the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard, used in open-source software suite OpenOffice.org, and also in proprietary software including Sun Microsystems Inc.'s StarOffice and IBM Corp.'s Workplace. ODF is a rival to Office Open XML. If ECMA approves the Office Open XML format, used by Microsoft in its forthcoming Office 2007 software suite, the Danish ministries could use that instead. The French government is conducting a public inquiry into how to make its computer systems interoperable, but has reached no conclusions yet. However, in a report commissioned by the prime minister, National Assembly Deputy Bernard Carayon called for a law making it compulsory for French government departments to use ODF when they create or distribute documents. He suggested that France ask its European partners to do likewise when exchanging documents at a European level. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO)Â approved the ODF standard in May, but the Office Open XML specification is still some way off that status. Ecma's General Assembly will vote on the text during its meeting on Dec. 7 and Dec. 8. It cannot amend the text, only accept or reject it. If the final draft of the Office Open XML specification wins the assembly's approval, it will become an Ecma standard, and go on to ISO for fast-track approval, which can take six months to nine months. ISO may request amendments to the standard before voting to approve it. Both Ecma and ISO are based in Switzerland. Before submitting the text to the general assembly, Ecma's Technical Committee 45 will publishÂ the final draft on the standards body's Web site. That could happen as early as Monday, according to Ecma employee Isabelle Walch, and another source with knowledge of the process. The publication of the draft will give software developers a chance to make their applications compatible with the final version of Microsoft's Office 2007 document format ahead of the application suite's launch to business users at the end of this year. Technical Committee 45 has held six meetings to discuss the Office Open XML specification since beginning work on it last December. At the most recent meeting held in Trondheim, Norway, from Sept. 26 to Sept. 28, participants discussed numerical data precision, a mechanism for describing application characteristics, and extending spreadsheet capacity before agreeing the final draft, committee member Tom Ngo wrote in a report of the meeting. Ngo is chief technology officer of NextPage Inc. The meeting is chaired by two representatives from Microsoft, while other committee members represent the British Library, the U.S. Library of Congress, and companies including Apple Computer Inc., Intel Corp., Novell Inc. and Toshiba Corp.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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This is the continuation of a three part series. This week we look at transforming XML with XSLT, querying XML with XPath, evaluating XPath Expressions, serializing XML and more. By David Flanagan. 0925
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. have wasted little time in demonstrating there is real work being done as part of their recent Linux interoperability pact. Just a month afterÂ the historic deal between the companies, Novell said Monday it will support the proprietary document format in Microsoft Office 2007, Open XML, in its open-source version of the OpenOffice productivity suite by the end of January. Novell also will release software that will bidirectionally translate word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between its version of OpenOffice.org's productivity suite and Microsoft Office to the OpenOffice.org project so Open XML can become a part of that open-source project, the company said. However, this does not guarantee that Open XML will be integrated into the OpenOffice.org code, said Justin Steinman, a Novell director of marketing for Linux. "We are going to release the code to the open-source community. Whether it gets integrated or not is up to the community," he said. Novell and Microsoft worked together on the translation project, which will allow users of a new release of OpenOffice due in January to create, save and send files as Open XML documents, Steinman said. Creating interoperability between the OpenOffice and Microsoft Office suites was a goal that was part of the companies' deal, announced Nov. 2, to make Microsoft's proprietary software work more seamlessly with Novell's Suse Linux and other open-source software from the company. The Open XML work will ultimately allow users to more easily share files between Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice, which support different document formats, Steinman said. The native document format in OpenOffice is OpenDocument Format (ODF), an XML-based file format recognized as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Microsoft so far has chosen not to support ODF and instead created its own file format, Open XML, for Office 2007. Microsoft's lack of support for ODF has been controversial, and the company further stirred up concern in the industry that it was trying to promote its own proprietary file format as an industry standard instead of ODF by submitting Open XML to Ecma International in November 2005. Ecma is a standards organization that can fast-track technology standards through the ISO. Ecma plans to vote on whether to approve Open XML for submission to the ISO as an international standard on Dec. 7. Microsoft released Office 2007, which supports Open XML, last week to business customers. The suite is expected to be widely available to consumers in retail outlets on Jan. 30.
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Following through on the company's groundbreaking deal with Microsoft made one month ago, Novell has announced that its version of the OpenOffice.org software suite will support Microsoft's Office Open XML format.
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Intuitive, naturally Hands on, part 2 Groovy, unlike Java, provides a relatively streamlined way to read and write XML documents. In the first part of my two-piece tutorial, I looked at how you can use Groovy's flexible strings, closures and iterators to quickly create XML fragments and files.â¦
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BREAKING NEWS - Early this morning, Microsoft reported it had been notified that its Office Open XML format received a 74% positive vote in a preliminary ballot that could pave the way for its final ratification as an international standard.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft&#160;has achieved a small victory in its&#160;effort to make Open XML an open technology standard. Massachusetts, the U.S. state that has mandated the use of open technology formats in its government agencies, has put the specification on its list of possible standards that can be used for documents, according to a document on its Web site.
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Q Somebody just e-mailed me a ".docx" file. Is this a Microsoft Word file? Why can't my copy of Word open it?
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FRANKFURT/SEATTLE  - Microsoft Corp.  has  lost a preliminary vote to have its Office Open XML document  format approved as an international standard, denting the  company's hopes of wider adoption of the standard by  public-sector organizations.
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Opponents of Microsoft's new Open XML file format is complicated and untranslatable; existing ODF standard is enough.
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On the Mac, in a Frontier or OPML Editor script. sys.unixShellCommand("open http://scripting.com/") I want to be able to find this tidbit later in Google. Please ignore.
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Novell will support Microsoft Office's Open XML file format in its version of OpenOffice by the end of January.
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This week we examine extra functionality in MSXML which provides additional properties and methods that can be used with the DOM interfaces discussed previously. You'll see examples and learn how to create similar functionality in Mozilla. By Apress. 0705