[KLUG Advocacy] Office 12 Has Font Preview!

[Andrew Thompson]

On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 08:45 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> This from a review of Office 12 - "new live previewing of font and layout
> choices, which should cut out the endless stream of "let's try
> this...no...undo...let's try something else""
> 
> Office 12 is going to support font and layout preview! Wow!!!  Just like most
> GNOME apps do now.... and OOo has for a long time.  Simply amazing!
> 
> Sorry, couldn't resist.

Actually, I'm rather surprised no one's mentioned the story out of
Massachusetts yet. In case I'm not the only one who missed it until last
week, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts declared the OpenDocument
formats the standard for all official documents, and will require all
agencies to adopt software which saves to these formats by default by
2007-01-01. PDF is also a sanctioned format under these guidelines.
Here's one of the earlier stories on it:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5845451.html?tag=nl.e589

This earned howls from Microsoft, which had announced that it would not
support the OpenDocument standard, which it declares inferior to its own
Open XML formats, and incompatible with earlier versions of MS Office.
It doesn't sound like Massachusetts is backing down on this one, though:

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=170700325

Considering the implications of this announcement, I'm rather surprised
it seems to have escaped our notice, or at least comment. Of course, it
didn't hit my radar until I happened across it in an online cartoon:

http://www.ubersoft.net/d/20050906.html
http://www.ubersoft.net/d/20050907.html
(and more)

Some references did show up on Slashdot, and there's at least one blog
up that links to a number of articles on the subject:

http://stephesblog.blogs.com/my_weblog/2005/09/massachusetts_m.html

I think my favorite so far is this rather thorough analysis, which
expands on the Massachusetts decision to discuss similar ones by
governments worldwide:

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/why-opendocument-won.html

I don't know. Maybe everyone else already does know about it, and I just
haven't been listening at the right keyholes, but I figured, just in
case... Anyway, apologies to anyone who's already heard it talked to
death, and to the rest of you, happy reading!

-- 
Andrew Thompson <apthmpsn at imagerie.com>
The Imagerie (www.imagerie.com)