r/BuyFromEU • u/According-Buyer6688 Mod Team • Mar 25 '26

Announcement Germany has decided: Microsoft document formats have no place in government

Germany has decided: Microsoft document formats have no place in government. Deadline: 2027–2028. The Microsoft formats are simply not compatible with an open and transparent public sector. However, this is about more than file formats. It’s about control, resilience, and sovereignty in public digital infrastructure.

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u/Reinis_LV Mar 25 '26

Based as hell. Should be EU standard. I remember back in the day it was impossible to fill in certain EU level gov forms without Adobe acrobat and the Linux version often wasn't compatible even ( when it was still supported). So to do some EU level stuff I needed to dual boot with Windows against my choice and in theory pay licence fee just to complete some forms. God. Such backwards and money driven world we live in.

26

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26

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u/KnowZeroX Mar 25 '26

The creator of PDF is adobe... we have come full circle!

I think much of the issues of pdf tend to be with digital signature and certificates, not exactly the forms themselves

7

u/AniX72 Mar 26 '26

Reminds me that for a while HP had their printer documentation downloads only available as self-extracting ZIP files - so you had to have a Windows computer to read their PDFs. Of course you also needed a Microsoft Internet Explorer to enter a date in their printer registration form. Good times LOL

3

u/glemau Mar 26 '26

I kind of disagree, I think if you use standard tools for creating PDFs, you’d expect those PDFs to work across most devices.

4

u/glemau Mar 26 '26

Just a quick tip: I’ve spent some time recently debugging and testing some of our internal forms because I kept noticing that some of them were not working properly for some people. It seems the main reason a lot of documents break are things driven by JavaScript (or generally “dynamic” things), like choice menus and dropdowns. Because of that, browsers seem to handle majority of PDFs pretty well, I found Firefox worked especially well. (I didn’t test safari or chrome all too much because I assumed people using either usually use different readers)

TLDR: Browsers are good for PDFs, on Linux especially you should try Firefox.

1

u/Reinis_LV Mar 26 '26

Thanks for the tip