Norway Mandates Government Use of ODF and PDF

siDDis writes "Earlier this year Slashdot mentioned that Norway was moving towards mandatory use of ODF and PDF. Now it's official: the Norwegian government has mandated the use of open document formats from January 1st, 2009. There are three formats that have been mandated for all documentation between authorities, users and partners. HTML for all public information on the Web, PDF for all documents where layout needs to be preserved and ODF for all documents that the recipient is supposed to be able to edit. Documents may also be published in other formats, but they must always be available in either ODF or PDF."

well duh

When you really think about it, how stupid would it be if a large government agency even in the US sent out a "document meant for editing" in a microsoft office format. I mean seriously. If the IRS sent me a tax form as a .doc file I would call them up and tell em what I thought of that but probably wouldn't get through cuz it'd already be flooded with pissed off people. I mean, that's like requiring all US citizens to own a copy of Office. Same with Norway. Any country that doesn't choose a non-propietary format is crazy.

Re:well duh

That would be like the Australian Tax Office requiring IE for some business reporting. The standard response is that you can do it or be fined. At least they've fixed the need for specific versions of the JVM.

This was a few years back, but maybe they've changed. Then again, it's the tax office.

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It comes free with Windows.

Windows doesn't come free with a computer. Or maybe the first hit does - can't remember anymore

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Windows doesn't come free with a computer. Or maybe the first hit does - can't remember anymore

Hmm... Windows didn't come with the Mac I bought last year. And most likely my next computer will have Linux pre-loaded.

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Businesses that have standardized on Apple must love you. (They are out there. I've had to support them. They get to buy a machine with Windows for things like this.)

Re:well duh

Yes, but to run Windows in a VM you need a copy of Windows. If you buy a machine on which to run Windows, Microsoft only gets the relatively small amount they charge the OEMs. If you buy a copy of Windows retail to run in your VM, Microsoft makes more. So if your goal is to minimize the amount you give to Microsoft, buying a separate Windows machine is actually the better choice, isn't it?

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Couldn't they just argue that since Open Office will open/edit/save as a Word document that your argument is invalid?

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They could do this until someone used an unsupported MS Office feature. You'd either need to cripple MS Office or treat Open Office as a poor cousin.

Alternatively, you can get a plugin to open/save ODF from MS Office.

Geez

Not to karma whore or anything... but the least you think an editor would do is provide the bokmal translation. This proves it... Slashdot hates Norwegian people. Again, not to karma whore:

" enhver burde ha likeverdig adgang å offentligheten beskjed

unnecessary

Basically everyone under 40 in Scandinavia speaks good english. Better english than many Americans, in fact.

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But do they have senses of humor and can understand when their culture is actually the point of the post, but instead just a detail in a parody of a very common practice on slashdot.

I think so. Gotta a friend from Stavanger. He's an ok guy and pretty sha

what i meant to say (I know use preview)

But do they have senses of humor and are they able to understand when their culture isn't actually the point of the post, but instead just a detail in a parody of a very common practice on slashdot. I think so. Gotta a friend from Stavanger. He's an ok gu

Svengelska

Scandinavians are so selfsure about the quality of their english that they'll insist that your rightings aren't valid, as you merely speak american. I've been living in Sweden in some years and feel again the most common swinglishsigns. I job now as an oversitter from swedish to english, in addition to controlling english texts, and it has been a good affair.

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Joke or no, but "Translated by hand"?

By someone who doesn't know Norwegian, or?

That's a machine translation. The words are unusual (to say the least) and the grammar is wrong.. e.g. "åpen standarder" should read "åpne standarder". "har bestemte d

Re:Geez

" enhver burde ha likeverdig adgang å offentligheten beskjed : Åpen standarder bli tvangsmessig innen regjeringen. " regjeringen har bestemte det alle beskjed opp på regjeringen websites burde være anvendelig i fri luft formatter HTML PDF eller ODF. Med dette bestemmelse tidene når offentligheten dokumenter der hvor bare anvendelig inne Microsoft's Ord - formatter kommer å slutt. 'Everybody burde ha likeverdig adgang å offentligheten beskjed. Fra 2009 det borger ville være i stand til valgte hvilke programvare å bruk for at få innpass å offentligheten beskjed. Det regjeringen bestemmelse ville likeledes gjøre bedre konkurransen imellom leverandør av kontor søknadene sier DEN - minister Heidi Praktfull Røys. " denne er avgjørelsen av regjeringen : HTML burde være det primære formatter for forlagsartikkel av offentligheten beskjed på Sykehuslege. PDF (1.4 eller nyere , eller PDF / EN ISO 19005-1) er tvangsmessig når du ønske å gjemme originalen layout av en dokumentet. ODF ISO IEC 26300) må av sted anvendt når utgiveren dokumenter det er mente å bli forandret etter dataoverfører eg. blankett det er å bli fylte inne av brukeren. "- Norge Ministerium av Regjeringen Administrasjon og Forbedring "

What!? How dare you! My mother is a saint!

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How dare you! My mother is a saint!

Perhaps.

But her møøse once bit my sister.

For Norwegian Readers

The circular [regjeringen.no]. I think this is missing some details that were recommended (like don't encrypt your postscript) that may appear elsewhere.

What about postscript?

I honestly don't know the technical ends and outs of either format (I'm a physicist, not a CS... albeit one who had to fuss at his students this semester for turning in crap in .docx format after I told them plaintext), but why the choice of pdf over postscript for the "formatting preserved" format? My department seems to use them pretty interchangeably... and aren't there tons of tools that do nifty things to postscript? (ps2* and *2ps style things?)

Does it compress better or something?

Re:What about postscript?

My vote would be 'no' on postscript. The tools aren't as commonly installed (or as refined) as PDF. Worse, I believe .ps files commonly do not include the fonts they rely on, leading to lots of headaches. For that and whatever other reasons, .ps is a cavalcade of "execution stack" error messages, while pdf always works.

"Whatever other reasons"

Postscript is a programming language; that's why you can have stack errors. PDF is purely declarative.

Re:What about postscript?

1. PDFs are much, much smaller - as AC sibling said, about the size of PS after compression
2. PDFs are relatively tamper-resistant
3. PDFs are more widely understood
4. PDFs are lighter to render

I could go on about how they handle images and whatnot better too, but PS is a wonderful format when you still need to work with the document - I'm being completely serious here - but PDF is better as the final distribution method.

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Ah, okay. Thanks.

Are they really lighter to render? My experience has been that acroread, xpdf, and such tend to bog down. Granted, this evince thingie that came installed with Ubuntu (which I just switched to, from Gentoo) seems pretty nice. (I'm a conver

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I'm a convert to "It just works!"-style Linux.

We call it OS X around here.

Re:What about postscript?

Does it compress better or something?

Yes. For pages of pure bitonal content, the JBIG2 image compression scheme can produce files approximately 30-40x smaller than the equivalent using CCITT G4. This is such a massive improvement that it makes it tempting to simply represent all documents in raster form with ancillary text information -- in other words, it competes with vector graphics as far as side. No other widely supported potential archival format provides JBIG2. This in itself is an enormous benefit, but not quite a deal-maker for PDF.

PDF really shines in that it is easy to parse and has a limited, well-defined graphics language. The PDF/A standard even further restricts the classes of operations a conformant file can perform. On top of other things, it spells out the requirements for fonts, to ensure that documents rendered in the future will appear as intended. It also dictates that details of the document's semantic structure be embedded to assist analysis of the archived data in the future.

I probably sound like a shill for PDF, but that isn't the case. I simply write commercial code which deals with PDF. It is a terrible shame that Adobe's viewer products have made such a bad impression on everyone. I believe PDF is a well-designed, simple, extensible format with a hell of a lot going for it, if you simply discount everything with the word "Adobe" in it.

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The problem with postscript is that it can be alife [harvard.edu].

Re:What about postscript?

I am associated with one of the groups providing input on these decisions, the University of Agder. I think the actual recommendation attaches some technical notes to the suggestion to use PDF, such that the PDF does not employ encryption and is a particular subset of PDF without proprietary features. Also I think there may be recommendations regarding handicap accessibility - some PDF is a blind man's misery because it doesn't preserve the document structure.

All of that said, proper PDF is PostScript. You can feed it to the PostScript interpreter and it will render. It's not full PostScript, but a subset that is easier to process and isn't a full interpretive language as PostScript is. I've wrtten programs in PostScript that have nothing to do with printing, it's a bit similar to Forth.

Bruce

Re:What about postscript?

I'd better qualify that. Many Adobe Postscript rendering engines will render PDF directly. There are lots of printers that do, many of them do not, however, advertise the feature. GhostScript seems to try but not do as well. The actual image stream is a tokenized logical subset of PostScript, the image model is the same and there is a 1:1 mapping of operators. There's extra stuff in the file that isn't part of the image stream.

It's been 15 years since I've picked up the black-and-white book which defines PDF.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:What about postscript?

Gah, way to want to reset the clock by 10-12 years. PDF was developed because shuffling PostScript files around was tedious and error prone. The files are large, they don't contain fonts, and since they are plaintext the cr/cr-lf/lf line end issue can affect the file on different OS's, etc... The publishing industry labored under PostScript for far too long. The first P in PDF stands for Portable for a reason. It's a far more portable format than *.ps.

Summary Forgot to Mention

A fourth format was also specified: Adobe Flash was mandated for all documents that need to include animated dancing silhouettes.

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You mean "animated chair throwing silhouettes". There, fixed it for you.

Forget Norway... what's Kenya doing?

Just kidding, this is truly awesome. With any luck, this will improve the efficiency of document handling in the Norwegian government and help set off a domino effect. Unfortunately, I think it's likely that us poor Americans would be the last such domino to fall, given the unbelievable amount of data that would require conversion (much of it possibly by hand) and our government's overt support of big business (i.e. Microsoft).

But the idea of thomas.loc.gov all being in PDF... wow...

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given the unbelievable amount of data that would require conversion (much of it possibly by hand)

Why on earth would you do it by hand?

Automating stuff like that is what computers are designed for. Open Office even has a batch converter built in.

Well, the question is, who is next?

I will be curious to see what other nations pick this up and runs with it.

Question is... will it stick?

There are lots of articles and talk about it surfacing in one government after another. And in some, it seems to get watered down to meaninglessness or removed completely (no doubt after behind-the-scenes pressure and corruption). So I have tended to ign

What about Non-Text Documents?

Does anyone know how this standard affects files that are not text? I mean things like posters, graphic images, audio, video, databases, complex spreadsheets, slideshows, etc. Basically, everything outside of Word?

For example, many government employees use Excel and are using features not supported by ODF. What happens when they need to send those files to others to edit?

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Everybody is already using .DOC to store and share their documents, many applications support it, libraries exist for development and there are a lot of documents out there in the format today.

Most of which don't work right in Microsoft office or OpenOffic

The writing's on the wall

Although Norway itself, a relatively progressive country in IT matters (both Trolltech and Opera originated there) is fairly insigificant in the big scheme of things, this move coupled with other national governments moving in similar directions, might very well be enough to get the ball rolling. If Norwegian government IT sectors report significant savings and increased efficiency, then even more governments will likely follow. It's a fact of life that smaller countries take a good look at other small countries to compare efficiencies and practices.

A good example would be the Finnish school system, which has consistently scored very highly in the PISA educational ratings. That had a major influence on other European countries, such as Germany, which scored much lower, and Switzerland, making them look at how they could improve their own educational systems. It's the same thing with IT. You could very well see other European countries making similar decisions in the future.

The biggest hurdle will of course be Microsoft, which will do anything it can to stop acceptance of ODF and push in OOXML through the door. They will almost certainly try to get their big business partners to bully local governments into accepting OOXML in place of ODF.

Re:The writing's on the wall

After Microsoft's brutal treatment of ISO, and the subsequent chaos due to 'voting' members no longer being interested, I'm sure local governments will resist a bit more strongly.

These people may not be as sophisticated as a 'big city' computer company, but you don't have to be Donald Knuth to spot the kind of shadiness that took place in ISO.

Highly Competent Engineering

The Norskies are also pretty open about engineering standards: http://www.standard.no/ [standard.no]

Most companies jealously guard their "intellectual property", Norway makes most of theirs freely available.

It ain't the books or documentation that make a project successful, it's the people.

Time to buy shares ...

... in furniture. In chairs to be precise.
Quite a few will be tossed about until Norway retracts this mandate, or adds "or OOXML"

M$ Hires Blackwater to Fix Norway's Terrorists

In other news: Microsoft has hired a sizeable force of Blackwater interrogation specialists to kidnap key individuals and influence Norways' government decision and policy makers to change their terroristic software policies "with force if necessary." "This kind of socialist-communist software can not be tolerated in a capitalist market economy," Microsoft's Blackwater press-liaison said. Bush commented that "Norway, you're next on my Freedom and Peace list," and also noted that "Norway has oil." And that "because of it, they should well afford expensive Microsoft software" and that this kind of terrorist path can not be allowed for the Norwegians.

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These applications do not feel snappy and crisp at all, though the code base is at least 10 years old.

Are you implying that MSWord is "snappy and crisp" compared to other offerings? That is certainly not my experience.

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What, MS Word doesn't support ODF? If it doesn't MS better get at it.

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Once ODF gets some momentum, there will be a lot more tools being built. Just look at the options for PDF. The official Adobe Reader has been crap since about version 6. (Not sure if 8 is any better.) If better ODF support is needed, someone will build it.

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The official Adobe Reader has been crap since about version 6.

Could you elucidate on the areas in which Adobe's reader (the one you are referring to) is deficient, otherwise you risk being called a troll!

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The applications are not snap and crispy but is that the fault of the standard or the application? With ODF, if someone creates an application that is blindly fast and light, everyone will get it. This avoids the vendor lock-in where you have issues ope

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I have become skeptical with news like this. Why? Because applications that natively support ODF appear to be incomplete (read heavy).

Of course, you can always use the ODF plugins with Microsoft Office.

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Having just tried, i found that in openoffice...
Backspace deletes the contents of a cell without prompting you (you can still undo)
Delete brings up a dialog allowing you to delete not just the contents but also any formatting, or to choose exactly what to

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It makes sense to specify a single format, and ODF is the only standard format that currently suits the purpose and is free to be implemented by anyone.
There may be a minority of people using it, but i don't believe any of those people would be forced to p

Re:Way too Orwellian

They are not undermining content or freedom of speech... The format is only a container.
They already mandate the use of standard containers or transmission media for other types of information, you can call the government on the telephone but you can't contact them using ham radio... You can write them a letter on a piece of paper, but you can't carve them a stone tablet.

They have to standardise on one format for practical reasons, to support a wide range of formats is more expensive and more error prone. As a taxpayer, i don't want to be paying unnecessarily for the government to support multiple formats.

They should standardise on published documented standards for several reasons.
They provide the widest and lowest cost access for the population who have to deal with the government, programs for reading/writing standard formats such as PDF and ODF are available for a wide range of systems and at a wide range of pricing/support structures. Meaning, you can obtain such programs for free if you want, or if your needs/budget are different you can obtain software with varying levels of commercial support. Big vendors such as IBM, Sun and Novell provide commercial applications and support for ODF if that's what you need. Because there are multiple vendors, competition pushes the prices down and quality up.

If they were to use a proprietary format, not only would they lock themselves in but also force third parties dealing with them to get themselves locked in too. By using a proprietary format the government are forced to purchase proprietary products at whatever price is set, and the end users are similarly forced. Because they need these particular programs (and anything else they might require) to deal with the government, people have no choice but to buy them. Because of this, the vendor can charge ridiculous amounts for retail copies while potentially giving the government big discounts to discourage them from migrating.

As a taxpayer, i don't want the government to waste money dealing with multiple formats.
As a taxpayer, i want them purchasing their software in a competitive marketplace so that they get the best deal.
As an end user, i want the same ability to go for the best deal rather than being forced down a particular route.
As a taxpayer, most important of all i want a government that does the best for ITS PEOPLE... I want a government that fights for the best deal, I want a government that buys from local suppliers whenever possible (paying more to a local supplier than to a foreign one is often a better deal, since a big chunk of that money will come back as tax), I want a government that doesn't force unnecessary expenses on it's people - especially expenses that cause money to leave the country.

Any government that forces all of it's taxpayers to spend $450 on a foreign product is acting irresponsibly, that's a huge amount of money leaving the country.