File Formats Blog

Doug Mahugh has some comments on UOF (Unified Office Format), along with a short sample of what it looks like. Many of the tag names in the uof: namespace are in Chinese characters, as is at least one namespace name! "Interesting times" indeed!

I have no idea what those tags mean, but I just asked a Chinese co-worker to look at the sample, and she was impressed, so I guess it means something. :) She also mentioned that typing Chinese characters is a lot harder than typing ASCII. I knew that, but I'm not Chinese.

Labels: XML

# posted by Gary McGath @ 9:23 AM 0 comments

Microsoft has announced an open-source project to convert between Open XML and Unified Office Format (UOF), a Chinese open document format. Like Open XML and Open Document Format, UOF is based on XML compressed with Zip.

Here is the Microsoft press release.

Labels: XML

# posted by Gary McGath @ 9:52 AM 0 comments

There are signs that there may be soon a new version of the MIX XML schema for still image metadata, superseding version 1.0, which has various bugs.

I don't know what "soon" means in NISO time. Probably not this afternoon.

# posted by Gary McGath @ 8:39 AM 0 comments

Fraunhofer Institute has announced in a press release (PDF):

Convened by Gerd Schürmann, head of the eGovernment unit at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS in Berlin, the 'Translation of Document Formats' Working Group of DIN's Information Technology Standardization Committee has now taken up its work. This new Working Group will create an in-depth Technical Report detailing how to translate between the two document standards Office Open XML (Ecma 376) and ODF 1.0 (ISO/IEC 26300) in order to support interoperability between the two formats.

Thanks to Brian Jones for the link.

Labels: XML

# posted by Gary McGath @ 10:08 AM 0 comments

Aperio Technologies has announced support for BigTIFF. It's not clear what this means, as BigTIFF is still in the proposal stage. The announcement says that "Aperio has donated these enhancements to the public domain, and is working with the TIFF standards body to incorporate them into a future standard release."

As a demonstration, Aperio has created what it claims is "the world's first terapixel image." Compressed, it's a mere 143 gigabytes, and the inspiring image which they chose for the occasion is a breast cancer slide replicated 225 times. It might take a while to download.

Labels: TIFF

# posted by Gary McGath @ 9:39 AM 0 comments

With Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight as a rival to Flash, interest in its underlying codec, VC-1, has increased. VC-1 is more formally known as SMPTE 421M. The really useful links are on smpte.org, but all the ones I've tried are broken at the moment. In the meantime, here are a couple of links on Microsoft's site:

• What is VC-1?
• VC-1 technical overview

VC-1 is being adopted for next-generation video formats including HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, but availability of codecs under operating systems other than Windows is limited at the moment.

# posted by Gary McGath @ 4:25 PM 0 comments