OfficeShots

The Open Document Format (ODF) is a new, vendor neutral and open standard for document exchange. ODF is currently supported by multiple office suites such as OpenOffce.org, KOffce, AbiWord and IBM Lotus Symphony. Microsoft has announced that MS Office will also include support for ODF.

In an ideal world, all these ODF implementations would be fully compatible with each other and with the published standard. Unfortunately in the real world, multiple ODF versions with software bugs and other inconsistencies present document designers and authors with many of the same problems that HTML authors face on the world wide web. Different applications may display and handle ODF documents in different ways.

This project will create a service called “ODF-Shots" which lets ODF authors and designers upload documents to a webservice and see how different office suites render their documents. This allows authors of complex documents and designers of ODF templates to ensure that their documents work under many different office suites. The service works in a manner similar to Browser-shots where HTML authors can ensure that their designs work under various browser versions.