Shah & Kesan Test Suite

Note: this paper is now relatively outdated, as the field of applications has changed significantly since the paper was authored. Although the authors have created newer versions of the paper, they have not updated the test results.

Developed by Rajiv Shah (rajiv.shah@alumni.illinois.edu) & Jay Kesan (kesan@uiuc.edu)

This note should accompany the ODF test documents. Due to interest from developers, we have decided to make these files publicly available as a way to improve ODF interoperability. Please contact us if you have any questions or comments. If these files are useful to you, please let us know. Our work is publicly funded and our sponsors like to know the impact of our research.

The test documents were developed in OpenOffice.org to serve as a reference test for ODF in OpenOffice.org. In developing the test documents, our goal is to test what 90% of users use. We are not trying to test extremely complex elements, but elements that are routinely used. The goal here is to see whether these implementations would be "good enough" for most users. The current test involves five test documents for word processing. The first test document focused on commonly used formatting features. The second test document concerned the use of images. The third test document focused on the use of tables. Headers and footers were tested in the fourth test document. The final test document focused on advanced features and included a table of contents, footnotes, endnotes, comments, and tracking changes.

We have included the test documents in ODT format as well as the PDF representation in OpenOffice.org. By comparing output from other implementations with the PDF file, it is possible to identify interoperability issues with ODF in OpenOffice.org.

A paper discussing the methodology and initial results in more detail is titled, Lost in Translation: Interoperability Issues for Open Standards - ODF and OOXML. The original PDF documents were not yet imported into Officeshots. The PDF's and screenshots contained in Officeshots.org are therefore from later versions of the software, and are not reflected in the results of the paper.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-0429217. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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