Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Last "big" format

Since the first public release of Atlantis in 2000 (oh, how time flies!), our priority was to have the best possible support for document formats of MS Word. The prerelease of Atlantis (version 0.7) was able both to import (open) and export (save) documents in the Rich Text Format (RTF) developed by Microsoft. It also supported opening DOC files of MS Word 6.0 and higher. Atlantis 1.1.1 (released in 2002) was capable of saving DOC files. Finally, the latest version of Atlantis can both open and save documents in the DOCX format.

But now we are considering to add support for one more major document format in one of the nearest releases of Atlantis. As you might have guessed, that new format is ODT (or OpenDocument), a native document format of OpenOffice. This document format is quite popular, plus it is now an ISO standard. After all, the fact that Microsoft had to add support for this document format to Word 2007 means a lot.

The good thing about ODT is that it is an open and well-documented format, though its documentation is not as comprehensive as the one of DOCX. The bad thing is that the ODT format is not fully compatible with the document models used in MS Word and Atlantis. As a result of this, a fully lossless conversion from ODT to RTF or DOC will not be always possible.

So probably you will be able to open ODT documents in Atlantis in a not too distant future.

No comments: