I wrote:
Surely any ODF implementation is free to *display* documents however it
wishes, even if it would implement (in the sense of "round-trip") the
document exactly. The *rendering* is completely unspecified by ODF,
isn't it?
Michael Stahl replied:
rendering is quite constrained by the ODF spec
also there are things that affect rendering that are not obvious, for
example having a hyphenation extension for the document language
installed or not (or just one that does hyphenation differently) may
have an effect on the layout.
"may" have an effect is a serious understatement, surely? Especially
in languages with long compound words, like German and Finnish,
hyphenation choices will drastically affect how many lines some text
requires.
So maybe I should restate my claim then, and say that an ODF document
can specify things like column widths and inter-line distance quite
precisely, but in general the number of lines and thus vertical space
taken up by a paragraph of text is up to the rendering client.
This is not a critique of ODF, far from it. One should just not
misunderstand what is possible.
--tml
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