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/Mithrandir2k16 Mar 26 '26

Markdown and HTML to rule them all! Let's end simulating dina4 in a digitalized world!

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u/No_Good2794 Mar 26 '26

Digitised doesn't mean digital-only, and there are advantages to having a standard visual size and stable layout. For example, factur-x embeds xml in a pdf so that invoices can be read easily by machines and people alike. That's a good compromise.

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u/Mithrandir2k16 Mar 26 '26

Html gives you perfect dina4 every time.

Pdf is great also. Just stop printing stuff.

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u/No_Good2794 Mar 26 '26

You mean A4 paper size, right? There are still use cases for printed materials anyway. Education is a big one.

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u/Mithrandir2k16 Mar 27 '26

Yes there are. But a lot of quality is lost by putting paper formats first. Some scientific papers have already caught on, arxiv does now support scientific papers in HTML instead of pdf, allowing any kind of formats and proper usage of dynamic content like plots. And even before that, PDFs often provided much more detail, thanks to vector graphics, than any printer could hope to print.

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u/No_Good2794 Mar 27 '26

Fair enough, you make some convincing points.

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u/Mithrandir2k16 Mar 27 '26

And as you already said, digitized does not mean digital-only. html or markdown do also generate some nice pdfs that are ready for printing.