OOo documents look different

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 7/10/06, Erwin Rol <mailinglists at erwinrol.com> wrote:

>
> those are all technical reasons, here we (with we I mean software
> developers, and that includes me) are trying again to find a excuse to
> not make what the user wants. I would dare to bet with you that most
> users expect their ODF (or DOC) documents to look the same even if they
> open them 5 years later with a new version of OOo or Word (of course for
> some documents they might say "oh well strange that it is now 26 instead
> of 25 pages, but of well, probably just a little bug in my new version
> of Word").
>

People can want that.. but it is an upstream issue. I have had many
Word 95 documents not do the right thing when being displayed in Word
2000 or Word XP. Fonts change, DPI changed and if the author was
trying to be clever it just doesnt happen correctly. Heck I have had
pdf's show up oddly if a font changed on the system.

There are too many failure modes in software upgrades which is why
some document systems bundled the fonts and layout engine with the
document. This way the system is 'guarenteed' to have 99% reliability
of showing the document the same each time. The documents also bloat
up like popcorn bags.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator