Word processing files

Main Page > Documentation > Format policies > Word processing files

Preservation Format

• Open Document Format (WPD)
• Original format for DOC (starting in Archivematica 0.8)
• Keep as RTF (RTF)

Access Format

PDF/A

Normalization tool

Unoconv/OpenOffice Writer Tool search in progress

Comments

• Unoconv is used as a command-line tool to open OpenOffice, which performs conversions to both ODF and PDF/A
• The files are converted to ODT, which is the OpenOffice extension for Open Document Format
• OOXML and DOC files are left in their original format owing to their ubiquity and ongoing support by Microsoft
• Normalization to Portable Document Format/Archival (PDF/A) may be an acceptable preservation strategy in addition to normalization to ODF using unoconv and OpenOffice.
  • For more information on the PDF/A format see Library of Congress Sustainability of Digital Formats: PDF/A-1.
  • PDF/A normalization of MS Word files is somewhat problematic because best results are achieved from within the native application - i.e. MS Office running in MS Windows. Archivematica does not support either Windows or MS Office since these are proprietary software packages.
• Rich Text Format is still heavily used and can be opened in a large number of software programs. Although it is proprietary, it has a published, freely available format specification. In contrast, we'll continue to normalize wordperfect files to .odt because there is no published spec for the wordperfect format.