To write this article, I went beyond the limits of my technical knowledge, which is that of an advanced user who has studied standard formats and their characteristics in depth, to understand why standard formats – one of the pillars of digital sovereignty – and proprietary formats – their opposite, and one of the biggest obstacles to digital sovereignty – are not perceived as a problem by most PC users, who continue to use Microsoft’s proprietary formats and place the access and availability of their content in the hands of the US company.
To try to remedy this problem, I will try to explain as simply as possible, using non-technical language (which may shock developers, but this article is not aimed at them), some technical features of the Open Document Format (ODF), which make it the cornerstone of an open and vendor-independent ecosystem for office documents, defending the digital freedoms of all users and the governance of their content.
I will begin by explaining how to unpack an ODF file, which is nothing more than a set of XML files and other files (for images and videos) contained within a ZIP folder, in order to examine its internal components and, in particular, the content.xml file, which is the one that contains the body of the document (i.e., the user’s intellectual property).
The aim is not so much to assess conformity (compliance with specifications) and interoperability (the ability to exchange files consistently between tools), as these aspects will always be dealt with by specialists, but rather to understand the advantages for the user of the open and standard format over the closed and proprietary format (which is falsely standard, since it was approved by ISO/IEC in defiance of “their” definitions of standards).
For this reason, I will make a brief concluding digression on the characteristics of the OOXML (Office Open XML) format used by Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365, again to clarify to users the risks they face and the harm they do to themselves and other users when they use DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats, as well as the ‘gift’ they are giving to Microsoft, to whom they are effectively entrusting the management and future of their content.
Analysing an ODF file
Take any document you have created with LibreOffice. For convenience, I recommend starting with a text document created with LibreOffice Writer, with the ODT extension. Before doing anything else, duplicate the file, because an error in the procedure could make it unreadable, and move the original to another folder.
Rename the copy, replacing the ODT extension with the ZIP extension, without deleting the dot. The file icon will become that of a compressed file. If it becomes white or empty, you have done something wrong or deleted the dot. Check all the steps until the icon becomes that of a compressed file.
At this point, right-click on the icon and select “unzip” or “expand” to extract the contents of the compressed file into a folder with the …
Interdependent tracked change: insert, then delete
Interdependent tracked change: insert, then format
Interdependent tracked change: delete, then format
Reinstate: an insert
Reinstate: a reinstated insert
Reinstate: a delete
Reinstate: a reinstated delete
Per-view tracked changes recording
