The big point that the article is trying to make is bookended by these quotes: "... there's a standard, things ought to be simple. So you could, theoretically a

The big point that the article is trying to make is bookended by these quotes: "... there's a standard, things ought to be simple. So you could, theoretically and perhaps even practically, use non-Microsoft software to get the job done!". "... it[LibreOffice] stubbornly refused to that, for ideological reasons." This feels at odds with my experience of the LibreOffice community and maintainers in general, and also appears to misunderstand the detail of the OOXML standard. I think the blockers to full pixel-level replication of Office documents have more to do with the sheer complexity of the formats involved and the obscure way some of the features are described, which AFAIK often involves just saying "do this the way Word does it" instead of describing the behaviour in a completely implementation agnostic way. As a Mac user, I am very familiar with the minor differences in rendering between Mac and Windows version of Office 365. Most people will know there are differences in rendering between the web versions and the desktop versions, too. And these implementations were written by the same organisation with people who presumably had access not only to the specification but also the actual source code and libraries that were used for the "primary" Windows implementation. For me to agree with this article's premise, I'd need to see an example of even one implementation of OOXML support that meets the author's standards.