OpenDocument Viewer

An OpenDocument Viewer is important - it will allow kids to read electronic documents (such as educational books) in the OpenDocument format (ODF).

Obviously, since the whole point of the project is education, giving kids the tools they need to read electronic books in various formats is critical. The OpenDocument format (ODF) has properties that are especially valuable for OLPC electronic books, compared to HTML, PDF, or other formats:

• ODF is a highly-compressed format that's easily deployed as a single file, unlike HTML. ODF is essentially zip-compressed XML, which results in astonishingly good compression. What's more, all the display components (images, formulas, styles, etc.) are contained in a single file, which means that distributing ODF documents is really easy. In particular, this makes ODF easier to handle and smaller than sets of HTML files.
• ODF includes information that makes it "flowable" on the screen, unlike PDF. Since ODF is writeable, it has the information necessary to let it use a whole screen - while PDF often does not. Given screen constraints, that's important.
• ODF files can be edited, unlike (practically) PDF and often HTML. If we want kids to be able to help themselves and each other, they need to given documents they can improve on by editing them. PDF is usually not editable, and in many cases HTML is merely a generated format (not the format used for editing). OpenDocument files can be marked as read-only, where that is important.
• ODF is a fully open international standard. OpenDocument was developed by a consensus process of many developers, and is not dominated by any single vendor. It is already an international standard, ISO 26300. To many countries, these are critical factors - they will be pleased knowing that books will be distributed using a fully open international standard.
• ODF supports international documents. It has all the international capabilities you'd expect (arbitrary characters, direction control, Ruby text, and so on).
• ODF supports accessibility. ODF has various capabilities to make it accessible to the disabled.
• ODF viewers do not require much space. In particular, simple ones can be implemented by translating to HTML and/or running XULRunner.

In short, ODF is a highly-compressed format, a fully open international standard (ISO 26300), and viewers can be very small. OLPC will want to make lots of books available to kids, and even has a special mode for reading in sunlight. It's a perfect match.

For general information about OpenDocument, see the OpenDocument Fellowship web page, or Same Hiser's "What is OpenDocument" article.

There are many programs that allow users to read and edit OpenDocument format today; see the OpenDocument Fellowship list of applications.

For a tiny viewer that's available right now, you can look at odftools, which generates HTML from the ODF and displays it.

The OpenDocument Viewer ("project #3") is probably what should be installed in the first edition of the laptop. The application is very small - it's xulrunner-based - and is being developed by the OpenDocument Fellowship as "project #3".