ODF Plugfest 2017

Tomorrow, Tuesday 10th of October, we will be having the 13th ODF Plugfest. It is being held in Rome and on-line.

We will be checking how well ODF supported in different software packages. Anyone can participate on-line, because we have built a website to do this testing.

In this blog, I will explain what this website does so you can participate. The first twenty people that participate on-line tomorrow will receive a ‘thank you’ postcard.

Why are we testing?

OpenDocument Format is an open standard for text documents, presentations and spreadsheets. The standard can be implement without the need to pay royalties and the standardization process is open for anyone to participate.

The better the support for ODF is in widely used software, the better for everyone. With this test site we encourage everyone to help testing.

What are we testing?

Does the document look the same?

When you receive an ODF file, you’d like to be sure that it shows on your screen correctly. On the test site, you can upload ODF files and the site will show them as they look in different applications.

Is there no information lost?

Losing data is not good. We can check for data loss on the site. You can add a file to the site and create a test for it. For example, you can write a test that counts the number of headings in a document. This requires a bit, just a bit, of XML knowledge.

In ODF, a heading is the <text:h> element. XML is a tree of elements. With XPath you can count elements in XML. To count the number of headings anywhere in a document, you can use this expression: count(//text:h). This expression gives a number. To make this a test, the result should be a boolean. To test if a document contains 11 headings, you write count(//text:h)=11.

When this test is saved, it is run trough a number of ODF applications. Here are two screenshots from a report page for a test that has run automatically. You can see that not all application retain the document headers. Oops.

The plugfest

At the plugfest we will be creating and evaluating more of these tests. You can join by signing up and reading the instructions on creating tests. We will be on IRC during the times of the plugfest.

The test site was created with support from the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. The code is public.