Ni Guangnan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering wrote an article recently to promote the China-developed document format, Uniform Office Format (UOF).

China is planning to integrate UOF with Open Document Format (ODF), an international document format standard developed by several international companies. Microsoft's monopoly in the field of document software will be broken if UOF successfully merges with ODF and the new format is approved as an international standard, Ni argues. As a result, the market of document software will embrace fair competition in the future, he predicts in his article. 

Several Chinese software companies, in collaboration with the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed UOF in 2002. It was approved by the Chinese authorities in April of 2007, becoming a national standard. China will begin to promote the standard across the nation this September.

For more details, please read the full story in Chinese. (http://www.china-cbn.com/s/n/000004/20070717/000000073171.shtml)

(China.org.cn July 17 2007)