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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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Docx is not a proprietary format, it's a standard, it's called Office Open XML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
And M$ published its specifications, so Libreoffice devs could support it. But here comes the funny part: M$ (deliberately?) doesn't follow the specification it published. So the formatting problems of LibreOffice come from M$, because they don't follow their specs, but M$ can just do whatever they want because of its market share.
I read this story a long time ago, and I'm paraphrasing, but on this wiki page you can read a lot of controversies related to this format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
It's a "standard" only in the sense that Microsoft took the MS Office binary file formats (which are basically just writing the internal state of Word/Powerpoint/whatever to disc), serialized it to XML, half-assed some bullshit documentation for it, and bribed the standards body to rubber-stamp it. It's still, at it's core, basically defined by whatever nonsense Microsoft's implementation does.
Aren't the specifications also insanely long and complicated for good measure?
Yeah, wiki says it's 6000 pages. But that's not that long compared to other similar file standards, and it also contains pptx and xlsx.
For comparison PDF standard is about 1000 pages, HTML (without CSS, just pure HTML) is 1500 pages.
Not only are they insanely long, MS strategically doesn't follow its own specs in places so other software using the specs "fuck up formatting" even if they follow MS's specs perfectly.
M$ is the best abbreviation for Microsoft yet