The Register looks at exactly why "It is practically impossible to move any non-trivial Word document out of MS Office to a non-MS suite and back again without it being more trouble than it's worth." OOXML, developed by Microsoft and first standardized by Ecma in 2006, became the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in 2008 after a grueling and adversarial process. Microsoft pursued standardization because it has always been a standards-led organization dedicated to maximizing the options for its customers. Or because it had to at gunpoint, while vowing silently to follow the letter of the law but stymie its intent. You decide... The Document Foundation (TDF) which spends its days worrying about such things, reports that Microsoft has effectively broken the standard by sticking with a transitional version as its default rather than the cleaner Strict variant. The result is that what Microsoft software renders is what Microsoft wants to render, despite nominal compliance... What we need is a test suite that can take any OOXML engine and test its compliance against what Microsoft is actually doing. That means the tooling wrapped around the spec has to account for proprietary dependencies that get smuggled in, such as fonts. It also means actively and continuously tracking the ground truth of Microsoft's evolving products and services. It doesn't need to be perfect, but it absolutely needs to be good enough. Compliant engines have to become good enough for a critical mass of users to coalesce around them. In an earlier article The Document Foundation reminded all software users that they have a choice. "When an institution sends a letter formatted with a proprietary font, embedded in a proprietary format, produced by proprietary software, it is not communicating information but perpetuating a dependency." "Digital sovereignty begins with the recognition that this is a choice: the file format is a choice, the font on the page is a choice, and the software is a choice."

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