[odf-discuss] Mars: XMLisation of PDF - opportunity for ODF?

[marbux]

On 11/7/06, Alex Hudson <alex at stratagia.co.uk> wrote:
The PDF
> would also only be useful for people who want to see the document
> exactly as the author intended: while that has some uses, I would think
> the ODF would usually be good enough.

Not necessarily. There is some unsettled law in regard to long-term
preservation of government documents as a result of UCITA and E-Sign,
<http://www.law.upenn.edu/bll/ulc/ucita/ucita200.htm>;
<http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=106_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ229.106.pdf>.
 The two electronic signatures laws overlap in relevant portions.
UCITA had been adopted by 49 states the last time I checked. E-SIGN
allows but does not require states to enact UCITA, however, major
portions of E-SIGN remain in effect even in states that do enact UCITA
pursuant to a provision that forbids state enactments from conflicting
with E-SIGN (UCITA provides three areas where states may vary their
enactments). The states that do not enact UCITA are subject to the
entirety of E-SIGN, as are the Feds and all other government bodies in
the U.S. clear down to the local level.

The problematic portion of each is that they allow government bodies
to store documents electronically rather than in dead-tree format but
only if they contain the same "information." What the laws mean by
"information" is not defined and remains to be decided by the courts.
But sameness of information is susceptible of different meanings. At
one end of the continuum of uncertainty it might mean bit-by-bit
identity; at the other, it could mean just that the same text and art
is included.  And there is a lot of room betwixt for a host of judges
in a multitude of jurisdictions to disagree.

An example of an E-filing scheme may aid understanding. The U.S.
federal district courts are well down the path on E-filing. They
require documents to be filed in PDF format electronically, but also
require that a separate dead tree version be filed conventionally. The
dual filing requirement is in part due to the uncertainty in the
applicable law discussed above; it is also partly due to the need to
get all of the major bugs out of the electronic system before
completely abandoning paper filings.

I strongly suspect that this fuzzy area of the law is one major
impetus for Adobe's initiative. E-filing of documents with courts and
other branches of government is now implemented fairly massively in
the U.S., albeit not yet ubiquitously. And PDF has been the clear
winner as the required format for such uses. At the same time, if you
follow the bleeding edge development work in E-filing, it is clear
that conventional PDF is only an interim standard in this arena. See
e.g., the various OASIS legal xml TCs. Everyone seems to agree that
XML is the future of E-filing. So the Adobe innovation is is hardly
surprising. Adobe is undoubtedly working toward a confluence of
conventional PDF capabilities and XML that would greatly ease the
transition by government bodies from PDF to XML.

That Adobe is doing so in the context of storing both the PDF-XML and
the corresponding ODF in the same JAR file is from my perspective both
a vote for ODF and a recognition that at least two major word
processors, OOo and WordPerfect, now enable import of PDF files in
editable form, but there is inevitable loss of formatting and
information as document complexity increases. With that recognition in
mind, Adobe is developing a capability that both meets the "same
information" requirement of UCITA and E-SIGN and better enables
editing of the same documents without loss of formatting. Want the
official document? View the MARS version. Want to edit the document?
Use the ODF. Want to E-file the newly-edited version? Save the edited
version as a new MARS/ODF JAR file.

I see this as a pretty shrewd market positioning by Adobe. When it
comes to electronic communications standards, where government goes,
those who wish to communicate with government must follow.

> I don't see the use
> in merging the files together to distribute as one, though.
>
It makes an incredible difference in terms of document management and
recycling of data. E.g., consider a law office that needs to preserve
copies of precisely what they filed with the court but still wish to
recycle document portions for other cases. Rather than having to
implement a complex solution for tracking/synchronization of official
versions  (PDFs) and recyclable versions (ODFs), both are stored
together. No need to add a complex additional layer of tracking.

It also dramatically simplifies SOA solutions.

A caution: if you read UCITA and E-SIGN, do not be surprised if you
have difficulty unsnarling what they mean at their intersections.  A
lot of lawyers are having the same difficulty.

Also, it would be interesting to know whether equivalent functionality
is in the draft Ecma MOOX standard. This could be an enormous factor
when governments are deciding whether to approve MOOX as an ISO
standard.

Best regards,

Marbux