[odf-discuss] .ott file format

[Thomas Zander]

On Wednesday 21 February 2007 06:08, Damon Anderson wrote:
> Certainly .ott is simply an alternate extension on an .odt that defines it
>   as being a template rather than a document, but in a corporate
> environment Template Files are extremely important, and I assure 95% of all
> documentation my company produces starts from an .ott file. I agree with  
> Mirko, why take out an extremely useful tool. Every office suite I have  
> ever used has document templates, to not include them in a specification  
> for an office suite would be wrong.

Nobody is arguing against templates.
Templates are good, KOffice has had them for as long as it exists (~10 years) 
and incidentally never needed an extra filetype for them.

> In point of of fact my major complaint with OOo is that I don't have a  
> simple and easy way of configuring all of my OOo installs for all of my  
> staff with my document standards, like the corporate font, proper page  
> sizes (A4 and not Letter) etc. The only real way to enforce a document  
> standard with OOo (unless I sit down and reconfigure the application for  
> every user login on every machine) is to require all staff to use the .ott
>   templates on the server.

This kind of proves my point that OOo has chosen the wrong solution for the 
problem of templates. You have to register templates with the application (in 
a generic manner) instead of with the file-system. As otherwise you'll just 
see people invent new templates and email them to each other or some such and 
the idea behind templates just lost its meaning.
When you register a bunch of documents as templates, or just a network 
directory or whatever you don't need the extention and you solve the problem 
better for corporate use.

-- 
Thomas Zander
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