[LINK] comparison of OO and LO

[David Lochrin]

On 2013-03-02 Jan Whitaker wrote:

> 3: when PDF exporting with OO and LO using the same template, the results are slightly different.  I see that LO and OO don't have some of the same fonts as the original document spec which was in Office 2010(?), and may be substituting something different from OO.

Not sure whether I'm understanding that correctly, but is the font used in the original Office 2010(?) document available on your computer?

There's an "Embed standard fonts" option on the PDF-export menu which the LO help describes as follows:

"Normally the 14 standard Postscript fonts are not embedded in a PDF file, because every PDF reader software already contains these fonts.  Enable this option to embed the standard fonts that are installed on your system and that are used in the document.  Use this option if you expect to have a better looking or more useful standard font than the font that is available in the recipients' PDF reader software."

PDF is a stable public-domain standard (ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008) and should be supported quite well by now.

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LibreOffice 3.5.6.2 can open documents in Open Document Format (ODF) formats 1.0/1.1 and 1.2, and save them in ODF 1.2, ODF 1.2 (Extended) or in the prior format ODF 1.0/1.1  (That's from the help!).

As of July 2011 when I looked at this Microsoft claimed that Office-2007 SP2 supports ODF V1.1.  However SP2 spreadsheet inter-operability was very poor, e.g. spreadsheet values were converted from ODF to Excel but not formulae or macros.

Text inter-operability was much better.  I prepared quite a complex document using OOo 3.2.1 on both Linux & Windows-2007 and found it could be opened by Office-2007 SP2 with minor, but annoying, formatting errors, mainly associated with indentations, bullet lists, and page margins, and a more serious problem with drawings copied & pasted as GDI metafiles (i.e. as “Open Document Graphics” objects with a .odg file extension).

However drawings prepared in LO & OO can be saved as Microsoft Enhanced Metafile drawings (with a .emf file extension) and inserted into an ODF document, and these are handled correctly.


More information than you needed I'm afraid...!  But I suppose it does show that Microsoft are taking open-document format seriously.

David