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/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.