Playing ping pong with ODF version; does it pose a danger to the end user.

[antlists]

On 22/04/2021 19:12, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
> Huh. So there's no good, universal advise I'm willing to give, except
> that you'll probably get nasty surprises with_any_  kind of complex
> office documents (regardless of the format being odf, ooxml, rtf or
> what else), if you read & write them across a wider variety of
> versions & different software products.

Any chance of taking a leaf out of WordPerfect's book? It's perfectly 
possible (in theory, and in my experience in practice) to round-trip a 
document between WordPerfect 6.0 (which ran on Windows 3.1) and 
WordPerfect 8, WordPerfect 2000, and presumably the latest versions of 
WordPerfect as well. I would seriously expect to be able to create a 
document using the latest WordPerfect, save it, open and edit it in 
WordPerfect 6, and then retrieve it back into the latest version with no 
loss of any features that v6 didn't know about!

The WordPerfect format has an explicitly defined code layout, and the 
spec says that unrecognised features are to be ignored but preserved. 
Okay, in Reveal Codes you can see (and delete) "unrecognised code", but 
that's the user explicitly doing it, not stuff being lost because it's 
not recognised.

Cheers,
Wol