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Germany has just made the standard Open Document Format (ODF) mandatory (blog.documentfoundation.org)

submitted 2 days ago by Blaze@piefed.zip to c/buyeuropean@feddit.uk

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[-] huppakee@piefed.social 23 points 2 days ago

I understand why the world is the way it is, but still it should have been obvious all along that it is not ideal for the government to data in a file format owned by a company. Even worse, a foreign company.

[-] NostraDavid@programming.dev 10 points 2 days ago

Do note that xlsx, docx, etc, are all just .zip files with XML files inside. If such a file is corrupt, extract it, and check what you can salvage.

That being said: Still controlled by MS, and thus a potential threat to the EU.

[-] Zagorath@quokk.au 21 points 2 days ago

Most—certainly not all, but most—documents that are written in Microsoft Word, or in LibreOffice Writer, would be better off as either markdown plain text files, or as LaTeX.

CMV.

[-] aldhissla@piefed.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Hear hear

90% of everything I read/write is either plaintext, explicit .md, or some .md-adjacent proprietary markup language (Atlassian, BBcode,...)

[-] loutr@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago

Sure, but 99% of MSO/LibreOffice users would quit after about 45s of trying to put together a document in LaTeX.

[-] Zagorath@quokk.au 4 points 2 days ago

Sure. And 90% of those are writing stuff that would be better off as markdown.

[-] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago

*with accessibility tags applied.

[-] Zagorath@quokk.au 5 points 2 days ago

I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean here. Both markdown and LaTeX are plain text. They're easily read by a screen reader. Though unless the screen reader is specially-designed for LaTeX support, it may be difficult to comprehend. That's on the screen reader though, not the document format.

[-] testaccount372920@piefed.zip 2 points 2 days ago

I assume they mean stuff like image descriptions that you can add in Microslop Word (don't know about LibreOffice). It's quite a neat feature that wouldn't work with markdown (might work with LaTeX), because these image descriptions are not visible to someone reading a document.

[-] Zagorath@quokk.au 8 points 2 days ago

Image descriptions are a thing in markdown. Images are inserted into markdown documents with this syntax:

![alt text](url)

[-] testaccount372920@piefed.zip 1 points 1 day ago

Cool, didn't know that one yet!

[-] Zagorath@quokk.au 1 points 1 day ago

Both Lemmy and Piefed support it, though weirdly unlike the alt text field when submitting an image post, this syntax only adds alt text, so only screen readers will see it—users can't view the text on hover.

[-] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Correct, accessibility also differentiates between titles and content, to better assist readers who use a screen reader.

[-] Zagorath@quokk.au 2 points 2 days ago

I replied to the other user showing how markdown image descriptions work. Titles are added with hashes.

# title
## subtitle

Text

### sub-sub title

Etc.

[-] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Screen reader should pick that up.

It's a bit trickier in LaTeX (depending on layout), given they convert to an untagged pdf by default using pdftex. For defaults such as section/subsection etc I think some auto-tagging has been added, but my memory is not great.

Issues crop up when you need to hack something (e.g. indenting parts of a proof using the quote environment to aid readability, creating more complex tables, or just using coloured text to indicate element relations), and here manual tagging is a must!

[-] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

I don't think it's really possible to have a reasonable argument against a vendor agnostic open standard in most cases.

[-] AngryPancake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Typst is the modern LaTeX. It's really good, fast and compiler errors are actually understandable.

[-] Bullerfar@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago

Great news!

[-] HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago

When are we going to have the equivalent for PDF documents, with the ability to comment, fill and sign, as in AdobeAR?

[-] thenoirwolfess@fedinsfw.app 3 points 2 days ago

Nice! A huge blow to those still trying to push Microsoft

[-] olof@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago

Microslop?

this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026

302 points (99.0% liked)

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