Word processing files
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Main Page > Documentation > Format policies > Word processing files
Significant characteristics of 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.