ODF and Generic Change Tracking

The OASIS group who are responsible for things like the Open Document Format (ODF) format are throwing around how to improve how change tracking information is to be contained in future versions of ODF. I've hacked some support for the "generic" change tracking proposal into Abiword in a git branch, and Ganesh Paramasivam has been working to make Calligra and KOffice support this too.

I thought a little bit of a look at how documents move between suites was in order. Obviously, these are really trivial changes. The larger use cases screem out for an automated system to test them, so that regressions can be caught and other office suites added over time if they choose to support this method of change tracking.

So, without further (or less) ado, the below video shows a document created in KOffice and bounced through a temporary file to abiword and inspected. Apologies for the delays in the first video, I've sorted that issue of frame dups out for future shows.

2011 April 9: KOffice and Abiword with Generic Change Tracking 1of2 from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

In the second video I make some changes in abiword and send those back to KOffice. In the process I found a few little issues which I've committed some updates to the abiword git repo to help with.

2011 April 9: KOffice and Abiword with Generic Change Tracking 2of2 from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

These videos where created with recordmydesktop, transcoded with mencode for 720 playback (mainly getting the video codec how vimeo wants to see it), and uploaded with ferriscp foo.avi vimeo://upload.