Bits, bytes and beauty

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Open Document Format in Leopard

Scrolling through the 300+ New Features page at Apple I noticed a mention of ODF under the UNIX heading. Curious, I found an ODT file, right-clicked and there it was: under NeoOffice, TextEdit.app sat there claiming it knew how to open my document. Both opening and saving works, the fidelity is about what I'd expect. But there's more: the new QuickLook feature also works with ODT files (see the screenshot of part of the ODF spec itself). Just find a file in the Finder and press space to look inside.

3 comments:

Markus said...

That's interesting. I wish it worked for me. I get no Quicklook with .odt documents saved with the latest update of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X. Any thoughts?

Bart Schuller said...

Markus: I see what you mean. I installed ooo3 and I got no previews, then when I switched to NeoOffice to verify, I downloaded a new version of that as well, after which files created by both previewed fine.

I conclude that NeoOffice is useful to have around, that ooo3 actively destroys working .odt quicklook setups and that NeoOffice may or may not be responsible for making it work in the first place. I don't have a Mac without it installed to test it on.

Markus said...

That seemed to do the trick. I installed NeoOffice and now my .odt files quicklook perfectly. Thanks for the help. It's odd that they don't work otherwise--especially since TextEdit handles them perfectly fine.