Standards - access for everyone. Converting OOXML, ODF and HTML.

Abstract

This thesis sets out to find out if it is possible to create a system that converts documents between Office Open XML (OOXML), Open Document Format (ODF) and HyperText Markup Language (HTML). In addition to this, some studies in their context is executed.

By looking at their specifications, it becomes clear that the structure of content is the same. Regarding formatting, the open standards differ. With OOXML and ODF it is a mere difference in structure of the document. HTML on the other hand need CSS in order to include equivalent presentation qualities as the other two formats.

A system was designed to create mappings between the formats. The scope was narrowed down to converting only text, without any presentational qualities. This was done to locate the lowest common denominator to build further on, and to make sure the conversions between the formats was feasible. With this restriction, the resulting system had successful conversions between documents containing text. The only exception to the system was that it failed to convert the contents of DOCX to ODT and HTML. However, the remaining conversions ran successfully; between HTML and ODT, from ODT to DOCX and from HTML to DOCX.

Even if the system was not carrying out complete conversions between all the formats, it shows great promise towards accomplishing this, hence affirming the possibility to convert between the three priorly mentioned formats.