About Open Document Format
You can visit the Open Document Format structure guidelines to know how to prepare ODF documents for the publishing chain or download ODF sample documents
Overview
A technical committee of the OASIS organisation was created in 2002 in order to create an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications. This technical committee had the ambition the create a format meeting the following requirements:
- be suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents,
- be compatible with XML v1.0,
- retain high-level information suitable for editing the document,
- be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools,
- keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other,
- 'borrow' from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted.
The Open Document Format became an OASIS standard in May 2005. This standard introduces an XML schema for office applications and its semantics. It defines specific elements to describe documents structure and borrows elements from:
- Formatting objects,
- SVG
- SMIL,
- Dublin Core,
- xlink,
- mathML,
- xforms.
In ODF, the content of textual documents mainly consists of a sequence of paragraphs, headings, tables, text frames, text sections and graphical elments. Additionally a text document may contain forms, change tracking information and variable declarations. Documents can also contain notes, references and bookmarks, annotations, hyperlinks ... Frames, paragraphs and inline text sequences can be assigned with predefined or custom styles.
An OPF document is commonly packaged in a ZIP archive file including the main content (textual, spreadsheet ...), images, mathematical formulas, and other resources.
ODF documents can be produced with one of the two following progams:
- StarOffice 8 by Sun microsystems (http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/)
- OpenOffice.org 2 (http://www.openoffice.org) a free open-source office suite
References
OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Technical Committee