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Office Document Architecture

The Office Document Architecture (ODA) format is a markup code standard devised by the ISO. The companion Office Document Interchange Format (ODIF) is a standard for the actual encoding. As described by Beaujardière, ODA provides a framework of layout and logical structure information incorporating previous international standards for coding the actual content. For instance, the CGM file format is used to represent graphics. Unfortunately, text is represented in the same relative "typewriter" fashion as DIF and DCA.

The ODA specification is several hundred pages in length. This complexity will require similar front-end tools as SGML in order to shelter the user from an endless stream of codes and structures.


© 1993-2000 Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar.
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