The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has updated the ODF open document format standard for office application. ODF version 1.2 was published on 17 June.

“ODF is the best choice for interoperability”, says Thorsten Behrens, chairman of The Document Foundation, in a prepared statement. The ODF standard for electronic documents is adopted by many software applications, and it is the native file format of LibreOffice.

ODF 1.2 has been adopted by many European public administrations, says the Document Foundation, which represents the LibreOffice software development community. The NGO points out that ODF 1.2 has been adopted by the UK Cabinet Office as the reference standard. ODF is also the proposed reference standard in France. “In Brasil, ODF is part of the Programa do Governo Eletrônico (e-PING)”, TDF adds.

ODF in Italy

The past weeks, Italian open source advocates began petitioning the country’s public administration to make ODF its default document standard, and transition to LibreOffice. Earlier this week a petition was launched calling on the Lazio Region, which includes the city of Rome, to switch. And in June, a similar petition was started, calling on the Ministry of Education to make ODF mandatory in education.

Plugfests

To test and improve document interoperability, a community of developers of software using ODF get together in so-called plugfests. These events bring together implementers and stakeholders of the standard. “The goal is to achieve maximum interoperability by running scenario-based tests in a hands-on lab and discuss new and proposed features of the ODF specification.”

The next ODF plugfest will take place in The Hague (the Netherlands) on 15 and 16 September.

The 1.2 version of ODF had been published by OASIS four years ago. It was submitted to ISO/IEC in late 2014.

More information:

ISO announcement of ODF 1.2
Document Foundation announcement
ODF plugfests