Document Freedom Day

Open document formats enable computer users to choose software more freely.

Transcript

The last Wednesday of March is Document Freedom Day. I suppose the idea of document freedom means nothing to most people, but it's important. Computer software that processes documents must be programmed to use the formats of those documents. Open standards enable anyone, not just certain companies, to write software.

Unfortunately, the most commonly used office document formats are owned by one American company, Microsoft. This situation makes many electronic documents extremely fragile. Access to the contents of these documents is controlled by one company. People cannot freely choose office software that meets their needs, and there is no guarantee that they will even be able to read their old documents in the future.

We need not accept this situation. Now there is an open international standard for documents: Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) - ISO/IEC 26300:2006. ODF is supported by a strong community, and now several excellent software packages are available. For example, OpenOffice.org runs on many operating systems and includes all major office applications.

Not everyone needs office software with graphical interfaces. In many cases structured text markup is a much better solution. Standard text markup systems are ideal for academic life, and they have been used for many years. For nearly two decades one of my colleagues has used the LaTeX document preparation system. He can easily revise and print papers and class handouts that he wrote 15 or 20 years ago. For academic writing and teaching materials I prefer DocBook, an XML application for books, articles, manuals, and other prose documents. Many people in the humanities prefer Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup. TEI is the most common format of high-quality literary works in digital libraries around the world.

Software Freedom Day began in 2008. It is still unknown to most people; however, this day can remind us that we need not depend on closed document formats that are owned by companies. We can own our own data, and we're free to use formats that serve our needs best.