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Thomas Zander announced in his blog the next Qt release 4.5 would include an ODF writer. In later versions an ODF Reader should be added as well.
Qt’s text module turns into a one stop document generation API where you can use QTextCursor to create your document via a nice API and you can then export the created QTextDocument to ODF ready to be opened by any opendocument implementation. Naturally exporting to plain text and html are still supported, as is printing to PDF.
The Qt toolkit is used by many software development companies to develop desktop software and is famous for the quality of its documentation and design. The KDE project which provides a Desktop Environment for Linux is the most recognisable Qt-based software. But Skype, Opera and Adobe products also make use of the toolkit. Zander observes a growing demand for OpenDocument support.
So, for end users the biggest advantage of the uptake of ODF is that more and more applications will standardize on this one format and thus applications will be much more interoperable.
When a first class toolkit as Qt adds support we can expect much more applications with ODF support to come. Zander also makes some predictions for the future of OpenDocument:
Longer term I expect to see email applications to send ODF as well as html in their emails. Just so they can use the much broader ODF set of features.
Time will tell.
