Open XML links for 08-06-2007

  • Article

Nuance OmniPage supports Open XML. Nuance's best-selling OmniPage Professional 16 has been released with support for DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats. There are many conversion and translation tools available for digital formats, but OmniPage bridges the gap between paper documents and digital formats. It can analyze a scanned image and break it down into real-world document components such as text regions, images, and tables. After the OCR and form recognition is complete, OmniPage can save the document in PDF, XPS, Open XML, WYSIWYG HTML, or other formats.

Contradicting standards. Rick Jelliffe has a post that revisits the POSIX/LINUX contradiction, in which he looks at how ISO/IEC has handled a clear contradiction between two proposed standards. There has been much talk of contradiction during the DIS 29500 process for Open XML, and as Rick points out, ISO/IEC has a track record of "constructive engagement to allow the development of consensus voluntary standards" when contradiction comes up. The goal of standards processes is to reach consensus, after all.

Standards documents: where to get them. Rick also had a post recently in which he described where to get ISO standards on the internet free.

OPC Overview. One of the most powerful aspects of the Open XML formats is the Open Packaging Convention, which defines the structure of the ZIP package that contains an Open XML document. When you're working with parts, relationships, content types, metadata, digital signatures, and related concepts, you're working with OPC. And that's true regardless of whether you're doing Open XML development, XPS development, or applying OPC to your own unique document format. In a new article on MSDN, "A new standard for packaging your data," Jack Davis and Andrey Shur provide a simple high-level overview of the capabilities and architecture of OPC.

Audio Interview. I had a chance to catch up with Jon Udell recently, and we recorded a chat about some of my travels for Open XML workshops. It was fun reminisce a bit about the places I've visited.  I enjoyed getting out and meeting so many people who are working with Open XML, but now it's nice to be home for the summer.

Translated Whitepaper. I learned last week from Julien Chable that Tom Ngo's excellent Open XML whitepaper (English version) is now available in several translations: French, German, Korean, Portugese, and Spanish. This is a great whitepaper that outlines the design goals and benefits of Open XML for non-technical management and policymakers. Thanks for the tip, Julien; and what do you mean by "allergiques à l'anglais"? :-)

Open XML Screencasts. There's so much Open XML content being generated by various people at Microsoft that sometimes I come across something I hadn't even heard of before. For example, Mike Ormond's series of screencasts on MSDN/UK. Learn about Open XML concepts such as content controls and metadata, and how related features work in Word 2007. Nice job, Mike!