In the time after the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 the Writer development team mainly focused on stability, performance improvements and bug fixing, only some minor enhancements have been added. We will continue to work on these tasks (an application is never stable or fast enough ;-)) but we also have some quite challenging plans for the future.

Some months ago we started the development of a new import filter component for the Word file formats (binary, XML and RTF). A Word import filter has to deal with Word features that behave differently than in OpenOffice.org Writer. Our current filter tries to do its very best by converting these features to something similar in OpenOffice.org but in some cases the results are unsatisfactory. So we decided to implement those missing features in OpenOffice.org that we see as the most important ones because they either appear very often in Word documents or they have a huge impact on the layout of the text. We are currently preparing documentation about this in our wiki. In the meantime interested developers can get information by asking on the developer list of our project.

When such new features that enhance the interoperability require enhancements to the Open Document file format we will propose the necessary changes to the OASIS Open Document TC. This way not only OpenOffice.org but also Open Document benefits from our efforts. Florian Reuter, who now works for Novell, lists some of the changes we have in mind in his blog . So there are a lot of common ideas how we can improve the interoperability between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word documents and I hope we can work together with Florian here.

But there are also some remarkable differences in the way we want to achieve better interoperability as Florian also proposed to deprecate some features in ODF or at least to discourage their use.

We (the Writer team) are working on OpenOffice.org. We are also committed to ODF which is our preferred file format. If solving interoperability problems helps our users (especially those who need to work with documents created with Word) we will try to do it. If this means we have to integrate new features into OpenOffice.org we will see what we can do. And if that means we have to propose file format additions for ODF we will do this also. But we will not support proposals to remove something from ODF just because OOXML can't handle it. If you remove features from ODF you also remove them from OpenOffice.org. This can hurt our users and damage the reputation of OpenOffice.org. Why should we do this just to support a format we don't care for (except that we should be able to import it as good as possible)? Of course at the end it's the OASIS Open Document TC that has to decide if a certain feature of ODF is superfluous and can be removed - but I wanted to make the standpoint of the Writer team (and the whole OpenOffice.org team) clear. I'm sure we are in line here with the vast majority of our users.

As I mentioned our support to ODF: we are working on the integration of the changes from the ODF updates, we are already doing this for ODF 1.1. (mainly accessibility), but we will also work on ODF formulas and metadata once their specification has stabilized. Metadata will also become important for us as we will use them together with the Bibliography project to greatly enhance the citation functionality in OpenOffice.org.

We also want to put more effort into usability. We have identified some use cases where a simplification of the user interface can be done without losing the powerful functionality behind it. We are also having a close look on all Writer issues with high vote counts. I hope I can present a list of our planned user interface improvements pretty soon. Please stay tuned for my next report here in GullFOSS.