Microsoft's proprietary formats like .doc and .docx dominate the office productivity landscape. Most people and organizations rely on these formats for daily document work. This creates a predatory situation where vendor lock-in is the norm and compatibility issues are taken as a omen that moving away from Microsoft Office is a bad idea.
OpenDocument Format (ODF) offers an open alternative. It is an ISO-standard XML-based format for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and graphics. ODF works across multiple office suites, including LibreOffice, Collabora Online, and Microsoft Office itself.
The format operates under the OASIS Open umbrella, a nonprofit consortium that develops open standards and open source projects. It brings together individuals, organizations, and governments to solve technical challenges through collaboration.
Coming after four years of development work, OASIS Open has introduced ODF 1.4, marking a major milestone during ODF's 20th anniversary as an OASIS Standard.
ODF 1.4 Packs in Many Upgrades
The development involved contributions from multiple organizations. Engineers from Collabora, The Document Foundation, IBM, Nokia, Microsoft, and KDE participated. Community members from the LibreOffice project also made significant contributions.
As for the major improvements of this release, tables can now be placed inside shapes, breaking free from the textbox-only limitation. This bridges a compatibility gap with Microsoft's OOXML and other file formats, making cross-format workflows smoother.
Accessibility gets meaningful upgrades through decorative object marking. Images and shapes can be flagged as decorative, instructing screen readers to skip them. This eliminates clutter for assistive technology users navigating complex documents.
A new overlap prevention property helps manage document layout. Anchored objects can now specify whether they need to avoid sitting on top of other elements. This gives users finer control over how images and shapes interact on a page.
Text direction support improves with 90-degree counter-clockwise rotation. Content can now flow left to right, then top to bottom, in this rotated orientation. The addition complements the existing clockwise direction commonly used for Japanese text layouts.
Michael Stahl, Senior Software Engineer at Collabora Productivity, explained the development approach:
Over the last four years, since ODF 1.3 was approved, engineers from Collabora Productivity and LibreOffice community members have worked with the Technical Committee to standardise many important interoperability features.
The feature freeze for ODF 1.4 was over two years ago, so while the list of changes is extensive the focus here is not on ‘new’ features that contemporary office suite users haven’t seen before, but improvements to bring ODF more in-line with current expectations.
For a Closer Look
The complete ODF 1.4 specification is available on the OASIS Open documentation website. The specification consists of four numbered documents covering different aspects of the standard.
Part 1 provides the introduction and master table of contents. Part 2 defines the package format language. Part 3 contains the XML schema definitions. Part 4 specifies the formula language for spreadsheet calculations.
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Theena Kumaragurunathan
