Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!amdahl!oliveb!sun!JPALME@QZCOM.bitnet
From: JPALME@QZCOM.bitnet (Jacob Palme QZ)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: ODA/ODIF
Message-ID: <38169@sun.uucp>
Date: 7 Jan 88 18:58:42 GMT
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Distribution: comp
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Approved: desktop-request%plaid@sun.com

There is a draft international standard, developed by the International
Standards Organisation, ISO, for interchange of texts between
word processing systems. Thus, instead of writing N**2/2 translation
programs between texts from N different word processors, the
intention is that one need only write N translators, one for
each word processor to ODA/ODIF.

ODA/ODIF supports both a logical text description (chapters,
paragraphs etc.) and a physical description (layout, fonts etc.)
in parallell for the same text.

Has ODA/ODIF been discussed on this mailing list before? Would
it not be nice if ODA/ODIF converters were developed for the
major word processing systems, like Microsoft Word, Word Perfect,
WordStar etc.? Does anyone know of any such efforts?

Another advantage with ODA/ODIF is that it would enable us to
put our word procesing texts into electronic mail, so that we
could in this mailing list put texts in ODA/ODIF format in the
future, and each recipient mailbox software would use an ODA/ODIF
converter to render the text readable on the computer used by
the recipient!
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