Disclaimer: You are free to reuse it “as-is”, on your own responsibility and without any guarantee whatsoever. No rights can be derived from, successfully or unsuccessfully, completing the steps outlined below.

This is a scenario that may result in a number of different documents per application. It concerns not commonalities but unique features of the respective application or their auxiliary products that other products should still be able to represent in some way - while remaining fully editable and usable in the application itself. This concerns for example visual objects like integrated flow charts/adaptive graphics (SmartArt, SmartDraw), music notation and globe shape in Calligra and KOffice, and new chart types in LibreOffice.

The point is to check on the basic principle that ODF provides a number of fallback mechanisms so that applications can have advanced features that outpace the standardisation (or are so specific that they will never be part of the standard), while being able to use ODF as the main format for all use cases and while remaining visually interoperable with others.

The steps are split into three sections:

# Creating documents for all unique features in your application (with visual guides for how this looks in the form of a PDF file) # Loading documents from other applications, which include features your application does not support, and saving them back again (including visual guides for how this looked in your application, in the form of a PDF file) # Loading the documents from step 2 back up in the original application and showing the result (including visual guides for how this looked in the form of a PDF file)

1. Create a new document and insert the unique feature object of the application.
2. Save the document as unique-step1-[identifyingfeaturename]-[application]-original.odt. (Note that “[application]” should be replaced by the name of the application being used.)
3. Create a PDF in your own application capturing the visual appearance
4. Exit the application.
5. Reopen the document and make some edits to the unique feature object. E.g. add some music notes, change the SmartArt/SmartDraw model, etc.
6. Create a PDF in your own application capturing the visual appearance
7. Save the document as unique-step1-[identifyingfeaturename]-[application]-edited.odt. (Note that “[application]” should be replaced by the name of the application being used.)

- Open the document - Save the document as unique-step2-[identifyingfeaturename]-[application]-[stage]-[newapplication].odt (Note that “[newapplication]” should be replaced by the name of the application being used, and ”[identifyingfeaturename]”, ”[application]” and ”[stage]” as stated by the original filename.)

1. Create a PDF in your own application capturing the visual appearance
2. Exit the application.

- Open the document - Make some edits to the unique feature object (as in step 1) - Save the document as unique-step3-[identifyingfeaturename]-[application]-[stage]-[newapplication].odt (Note that ”[identifyingfeaturename]”, “[application]”, ”[stage]” and ”[newapplication]” shoud be as stated by the original filename.)

1. Create a PDF in your own application capturing the visual appearance
2. Exit the application.

Please follow the file name convention outlined in the faq. Note that the PDF files can be included as a previewing aid, but uploading the ODF files is much more important.

A list of known issues. Implementations not listed here may or may not work as expected. Results may vary depending on user settings and computer environment. Use at your own risk.