OpenDocument and Palm - a start

    I support open formats and standards, and use one in particular on a daily basis. The OpenDocument format is an open, ISO standard for the usual Microsoft Office app formats like word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, etc. The format is currently supported by a variety of applications, including StarOffice, OpenOffice, Google's Docs & Spreadsheets, etc. There is even work on several plugins for MS Office to allow reading and saving in OpenDocument format. There are a growing number of organizations that have joined the ODF Alliance, including Sun, IBM, Novell, Oracle, EMC, Google, Red Hat, et al.
    I'm also a big Palm OS user, considering my Palm Tungsten T3 my second brain. So I was thrilled to see support for OpenDocument finally starting to come to the Palm platform, in the form of .odt support in PalmFiction. I found this when reading TamsPalm-the Palm OS Blog, and this entry in particular. I immediately downloaded PalmFiction and tried it out on a couple of .odt files I updated from older versions of StarOffice (.sxw). It read them off of my SD card in their native .odt format fine, although it looks like it currently supports basic access to the text, since one of the documents was a form using tables, and the text came through fine but none of the table formatting or form layout was displayed. For now, this is fine for me, as I tend to be an LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) kinda guy and tend to prefer to stick with plain, old fashioned ASCII text.

Posted at 12:13PM Nov 08, 2006 by dragonfly in StarOffice  |  Comments[0]