OpenDocument Viewer

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

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

• ODF is a compressed, single file, unlike HTML. ODF is essentially zip-compressed XML, which results in astonishingly good compression. What's more, all the components (images, formulas, styles, etc.) are 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", 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.
• It 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.

OpenDocument Viewer (proposed) - this application will let kids read documents in OpenDocument format, a highly-compressed format that is a fully open international standard (ISO 26300). The application is very small (it's xulrunner-based) is being developed by the OpenDocument Fellowship (see "project #3")