The Technical Committee of the OASIS Consortium has approved the final version of the ODF 1.3 specification (OpenDocument), which was announced at the end of 2019. The OpenDocument 1.3 format (used in particular later LibreOffice) has been ratified by the technical committee of the OASIS consortium in which the members of the OpenDocument TC approved this specification by special majority vote.
The specification had been published for public review as required by the TC process. The vote to approve as a Committee Specification was passed and the document is now available online at the OASIS Library.
After being approved by the technical committee, the specification ODF 1.3 received the status of "Committee Specification", which implies the complete completion of the work, the future immutability of the specification and the preparation of the document for use by developers and third-party companies. The next step will be the approval of the specifications presented for the role of the OASIS and ISO / IEC standard.
About ODF
For those who are unfamiliar with the OpenDocument format, they should know that is an XML-based open document file format for office applications, used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical elements.
The OpenDocument format specifies the characteristics of an open XML-based digital document file format, independent of the application and independent of the platform, as well as the characteristics of the software applications that read, write and process said documents.
It is applicable to the creation, editing, viewing, sharing and archiving of documents, including text documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, drawings, charts, and similar documents commonly used by personal productivity software applications.
What does the new version of ODF 1.3 include?
OpenDocument Format v1.3 is an update of the international standard version 1.2, which was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO / IEC 26300 in 2015. OpenDocument Format v1.3 includes security enhancements documents, clarifies insufficient specifications and makes other timely improvements.
The key difference between OpenDocument 1.3 and the previous version of the specification was the inclusion of new features to protect documents, such as verification of documents with digital signature and content encryption with OpenPGP keys. The new version also includes wording clarifications and some of the functions already available are expanded, for example:
- Added support for polynomial regression types and moving average for charts.
- Additional methods were implemented to format numbers into numbers.
- Added a separate type of headers and footers for the header page.
- The paragraph indentation means is determined by context.
- Additional arguments are suggested for the WEEKDAY function.
- Added a new template type for main text in documents.
ODF is an XML-based application and platform independent file format for storing documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements.
The specifications also include requirements for organizing the reading, writing, and processing of such documents in applications.
The ODF standard is applicable for creating, editing, viewing, sharing and archiving documents, which can be text documents, presentations, spreadsheets, raster graphics materials, vector drawings, diagrams and other types of content.
The specifications consist of four parts, in which part 1 describes the general ODF schema, part 2 describes the OpenFormula specification (spreadsheet formulas), part 3 describes a model for packaging data in an ODF container, and Part 4 defines the OpenFormula formula description format.
The new version ODF format is now entering its ratification process, scheduled for late 2020 or early 2021. ODF 1.3 will be submitted to ISO for standardization.
Finally, if you want to know more about the approval of the specification, you can consult the details of the parts of the specifications in the following links.