documents

Make Word documents beautiful for the Web with Calameo

Calameo is a new service for publishing documents from your computer to the Web. Like Scribd, it's dead simple to use, and will slurp up all sorts of documents of up to 100MB in size. What makes the service noteworthy is that you can take documents online and offline with a click of a button, without removing them entirely--which could be useful to business or education users who want to upload many items, then make them public at a later date.

Of course, the strong suit with any of these document-hosting services is the viewer. Calameo's iteration is … Read more

Work with PDF files sans Adobe Acrobat

Some programs are more trouble than they're worth.

I'm a big fan of the PDF file format. It lets you share files with people using almost any type of computer without worrying about whether they have the right program installed to view it, or whether it will look to them the way it looks to you.

The problem is Adobe Systems' Acrobat, which is simply more software than I need to meet my meager PDF requirements. (It's also more annoying than any two Office apps combined.)

The fact is, you can create, convert, and edit PDF files … Read more

Yudu Freedom hosts your PDFs, makes them SEO friendly

Yudu Freedom is a new entrant to the world of online document publishing. Like Scribd, it lets you take PDF files from your hard drive and host them online for free. The files can be viewed a little faster than with Adobe's Acrobat reader, and it runs entirely in Flash with that neat page turning effect you might have seen in other document hosting services such as Issuu and Idio.

Yudu promises that any document you upload will be search engine optimized, making it show up in Google, and so on. There's also a built in search tool, … Read more

EU investigation into Open XML vote still ongoing

European antitrust regulators are investigating whether Microsoft abused its desktop software market dominance in its effort to standardize the Office Open XML file formats.

The European Commission's antitrust regulatory body sent queries to several European countries to see how the standards-setting process was working, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.

The investigation is still ongoing, he added.

The effort stems from a complaint lodged by anti-Microsoft lobbying group ECIS (European Commission for Interoperable Systems). The Commission said in January that it is exploring whether the Open XML file formats are sufficiently interoperable with competitors' products.

The Wall Street Journal in … Read more

Challenges coming to ISO Open XML vote?

Now that Office Open XML (OOXML) has been certified as an ISO standard, there is a possibility that the vote leading to that result will be challenged. It seems Microsoft is already counting on it.

The ISO on Wednesday officially announced that Open XML received enough votes to become a standard, reversing a previous attempt in September that failed.

But there have been several reports of "irregularities" in the voting of the 87 national standards bodies that participated.

Those complaints could lead to a formal appeal of the votes which, under ISO rules, need to be lodged by … Read more

ISO: Office Open XML ratified as standard

As expected, the ISO on Wednesday announced that Office Open XML (OOXML) has been approved as a standard, marking the end a long and sometimes contentious path.

The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued a press release with the details of a vote that showed Open XML receiving 75 percent approval and 14 percent disapproval. It needed two-thirds approval and not more than 25 percent disapproval to pass.

News of the vote results circulated on Tuesday when open-document advocates released a document showing the results. Microsoft confirmed the information later in the day.

The effort to make Open XML … Read more

Scribd now offering free document scanning [Update: it's real!]

Update (10:06 AM): The submission process differs from the original plan. If you have the address, please don't send anything there. Please check the updated instructions below. And yes--this is real. Post has been amended from the original to reflect these changes.

We know it's April 1st, but this is 100 percent real. I made James Yu, Senior Product Developer at Scribd swear on his unborn first child that this isn't an April fool's gag. Starting today the document hosting company will take any of your real documents and scan them for you to be … Read more

Open XML appears to clear ISO standard vote

Early reports Sunday indicate that Office Open XML (OOXML) appears to have enough votes to be certified an ISO standard. An official tally is not expected until Monday.

As the votes come in from the 87 national standards bodies, so have a number of complaints of irregularities and strong-arm tactics in different countries, including Poland and Norway.

The OpenMalaysia blog, run by openness advocates and students, found that the ballot, which closed Saturday night, had the necessary combination of more than two-thirds approve votes and less than a quarter for disapprove.

Lawyer and standards expert Andrew Updegrove, an advocate for … Read more

U.S. expected to recommend Open XML as ISO standard

The United States is expected to recommend that Microsoft's Open XML file formats be ratified as an international standard, according to people involved in the process.

Two members of the technical committee tasked with setting the national position on a pivotal vote said the States will retain its "Approve" position in a vote to make Open XML a standard at the International Organization for Standards (ISO).

The chair of the committee, Patrick Durusau, who is also the editor of the rival OpenDocument standard, said that the controversy surrounding Microsoft's Open XML standards bid is being fueled … Read more