As governments move toward digital sovereignty, open document formats such as ODF are becoming more important: they allow documents to remain usable without depending on a particular software vendor. But adopting ODF is only the beginning.
Twelve years of ODF adoption in Taiwan has taught us that a document can pass a formal ODF schema validator and still cause problems in real-world use — from layout-grid drift and hand-crafted headings and tables of contents to automatic-style bloat and other document anti-patterns.
This talk introduces odfvalidator-lib, an MPL-2.0 project developed under a project of Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs. Built on top of TDF ODF Toolkit's specification validator, it adds format-quality checkers designed to catch problems that schema validation cannot. We will discuss what we learned from applying these checks in practice, and show how the embeddable C++/C ABI library, language bindings, structured JSON output, and batch mode can be integrated into document-processing pipelines.
Because an open format is only useful if we can trust the documents we put into it.
