[NLnet] PRESS RELEASE: New ODF testing method uncovers flaws in office suites

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PRESS RELEASE
New ODF testing method uncovers flaws in office suites

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This press release is also online at:

http://opendocsociety.org/news/new_testing_method_uncovers_flaws_in_office_suites
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OpenDoc Society held its 12th ODF Plugtest on 16 and 17 November 2017,
hosted in Paris by the French Ministry of Finance and POSS. Delegates
came from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, UK,
Ukraine, Taiwan, The Netherlands, Luxemburg, United States and Belgium.
They represented application vendors, standards bodies, governments, the
European Commission and the European Parliament.

The ODF Plugfest aims to improve interoperability among applications
that use the Open Document Format (ODF), which is an open standard
created by OASIS that is supported by most productivity tools in the
market today and is mandatory for use by governments throughout the
world. It is also published as an international standard, as ISO/IEC
26300. This edition of the ODF Plugfest featured a new testing
infrastructure for the creation and excution of ODF autotests, partly
financed by the Dutch government. Prior to the plugfest, developers had
already submitted a significant set of tests to the server. The ODF
Plugfest focused on triaging these tests, running them, analysing their
results, creating new tests, identifying additional features to be
tested and improving the test methodology.

One of the tests revealed that a number of established office suites
lose heading hierarchy when opening and saving a document in ODF format,
due to flaws in the alignment of their own legacy formats and the ODF
standard. Loss of hierarchical structure makes a document far less
accessible to disabled users who rely upon assistive technologies such
as reading software or braille outputs to navigate through documents.
The uncovered flaw damages common functionality for all users, such as
the generation of tables of content but also influences automated
content classification and information retrieval.

"The flaws discovered are a testament to the importance and
effectiveness of the new testing methodology we have adopted", says
Michiel Leenaars of OpenDoc Society. "Losing document information which
is so critical to people with disabilities should be considered a major
shortcoming of any application. One key aspect of moving from
vendor-specific legacy file formats to ODF as a global office standard
is that we are able to uncover this kind of significant data loss. Now
the three vendors involved can get to work and improve the
implementation in their products."

The testers also found other issues, for example with the way that
applications treat Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese language
with vertical writing, or how applications process colours in different
and sometimes unexpected ways.

"These results show that even digitally born documents are not safe for
future generations as long as we don't modernise the tools we work
with", says Jos van den Oever, co-chair of the ODF Technical Committee
and member of the UNESCO Persist Technical Taskforce. Van den Oever, an
expert on document formats employed by the Netherlands government, is
the architect behind the new testing framework. "The fact shows that we
have to be careful which tools we adopt, if we care about our
information in the long term. The fact that the visual appearance is
consistent between the original documents and the damaged documents
makes these particular flaws even more treacherous. Merely opening and
saving in the wrong office application is enough to cause permanent
damage to user documents, and the end user cannot actually see the
difference."

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Not for publication:

     Link to the full report of the 12th ODF Plugfest:
     http://odfplugfest.org/2016-paris/report.html
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