[ODFPlugtest] writing implementation specific defaults

[Hanssens Bart]

Hi Daniel,

> I am not qualified to be taken seriously, but I agree with Wouter. 

You're as qualified as anyone else :-)

(...)

> The case is very similar to the history of HTML+CSS in my opinion.

Originally HTML wasn't designed to handle layout. It allowed scientists to publish information on the Net without having to learn SGML...

I know users expect documents to look alike, but at the same time we have to be careful that the rendering can remain flexible (otherwise we end up with something similar as buying a 1900 pixels wide monitor and having to look at a webpage that is fixed to 800 pixels)


> First I wish fonts could be embedded in the documents! I know there is
> some work in this direction (which I did not closely follow, sorry),
> and I assume it would give rise to severe copyright issues (it is obvious
> to me that I would not be allowed to distribute the document if I embedded
> fonts that do not have such a permissive license, but most users would
> give no thought to the copyright status of the font at all). A solution
> here would be breakthrough in interoperability!

Actually, embedding fonts is something we already know how to do: PDF leads the way in this, and many fonts already contain a flag that indicates if a font can be fully embedded or not (or only the subset of it)

Font embedding is also important for archives, by the way (then again, since ODF is open en based upon XML, your data will still be there)


> Text documents could contain hints to layout in a similar way. If the
> line breaks and page breaks created during layout would be saved into
> the document, ...

Page breaks hints can already be stored (text:soft-page-break in ODF 1.1)


Best regards,

Bart