Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

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chipotle_coyote

The benefit that the linked article specifically mentions is being able to round-trip documents between OnlyOffice and coworkers who are still using Microsoft Office apps without losing any formatting. If you're not in a position where you have to do this, it probably doesn't sound like a big deal. Most of the time I don't have to do this, and I think most engineers hanging around HN wouldn't need to, either. But if you are in a position where this is a job requirement, it generally makes "hey, it's 95% compatible" into a 100% nonstarter.

I've found this is super hard to explain to people who haven't had to deal with it. I have, in sending fiction stories back and forth to editors. The formatting for those is ridiculously simple... except that you need absolute 100% compatibility with Word's document revision tracking features to see your editor's comments, respond to them, accept or reject their changes, and so on. And while I haven't checked in a couple years, when I did, the only non-Microsoft stuff I found that could do it reliably were two commercial, Mac-only word processors (Apple Pages and Nisus Writer Pro). I hadn't heard of OnlyOffice before this; if I ever switch to Linux, I'll keep it in mind.

If M$ really loves open source, then they would have opened their office formats. They may even have made life easy for themselves by dropping their proprietary formats in favour of open.

This has never happened. Their intention is to retain customers on Office 365 and Azure AD subscriptions to keep large corporations on their books.

A large portion of people are moving away form documents and using things like markdown which is a sensible move. Another sensible move is towards LaTeX. Calc and presentations though is a sore point.

I think the days are numbered for office applications on the desktop, sadly. There is certainly much less interest in it now than there was a decade ago, maybe this is true for the laser printer also, are the two in tandem?

Do we need a spreadsheet? Isn't that an anti-pattern where we'd just be better off with sqlite and a perl/python script to pipe to gnuplot? I know one of things I hated greatly was having to do the same graph fiddling over and over again. It is probably better to have the graph/calculation run on demand.

'member when the reveal that MS buried system information in word documents shocked people as it allowed for tracing authors? Regardless of editing, opening the document on another computer grow the file.

Like this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

I remember MS being roundly criticised for OOXML when it landed, because it had fairly major parts that were defined by reference to the behaviour in the MS implementation. Literally "the correct behaviour according to the specification is whatever Microsoft Word does".

I can have a certain amount of sympathy for MS doing that, because if your proprietary file format includes things like "take a dump of whatever the app happens to have in memory in some magical region or other", it's an uphill battle to get anything rigorous out of it in the first place. It doesn't satisfy one of the main goals of an open standard, though: that anyone should be able to offer a complete alternative implementation, purely by reference to the standard.

So no, not like that.

I think there wasn’t a way for Microsoft to do this in a way that satisfied all critics.

Their XML-based format existed for a few years before it was made into an open standard, so the alternative would be a standard that didn’t describe the format of the zillions of documents ‘out there’.

Also, chances are nobody at Microsoft itself did know the exact effect of many of the more obscure flags.

So, you either get a clean start, or you get a standard that ‘all’ existing documents can be converted to without change/loss of formatting (‘all’ in quotes because there likely are truly old documents starting life, say, as WordPerfect documents converted into “WP compatible MS Word .doc”, edited a bit, converted to “MS Word .docx”, edited a bit more, converted into open office XML whose layout changed over time)

If you want the former, use https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument.

I remember WP being a very stable format between versions, unlike Word ~ 2000, it wasn't able to manage their own document formats. So if people put up with the issues then, why not now?

When I made a docx generator, I understood the 14000 page ECMA spec was barebones and I had to reverse engineer the output of MS Word to figure out the XML tags and attributes.

I hope more people are moving to markdown, but how are you confidence it's most and not just software developers?

I think spreadsheets are still needed, just more flexible ones like Simon Peyton Jones elastic sheet defined functions:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jH2Je6wUvPs

Perhaps calc implementing that first would be a competitive advantage.

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