ISO SC34, now heavily controlled by Microsoft people who goes to ISO meetings happening all over the planet, has published a report of defects of the pseudo ISO standard ISO29500. They do not provide a definition of what is an "existing document":
29500 Defects: Explanation of whether to resolve defects by Corrigendum or by Amendment
Defects in ISO/IEC 29500:2008
Explanation of whether to resolve defects
by Corrigendum or by Amendment
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG4
2009-03-26
[…]However, ISO/IEC 29500 is a very large and complex multi-part standard, and it is not surprising that the text contains many unintentional technical defects, which nevertheless don't make it impossible to implement the standard.
In the course of drafting, some existing office document features were unintentionally overlooked, which result in it being impossible to fully represent some of the corpus of existing documents in ISO/IEC 29500.
The corpus of existing documents probably means Office 2007 documents, which is an undocumented file format.
Here is the email I sent to the SC34 chairman:
From Benjamin Henrion <gro.iiff|noirnehb#gro.iiff|noirnehb>
to moc.liamg|12homas#moc.liamg|12homas
date Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 4:53 PM
subject Definition of an "existing document"
Dear Chairman of SC34,I would like to submit a request and a comment by having read the
following text:0036(pdf) 29500 Defects: Explanation of whether to resolve defects by
Corrigendum or by Amendmenthttp://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/wg4/archive/sc34-wg4-2009-0036.pdf
"In the course of drafting, some existing office document features
were unintentionally overlooked, which result in it
being impossible to fully represent some of the corpus of existing
documents in ISO/IEC 29500."Can you provide a definition of what an "existing documents" means?
Best regards,
—
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403
Let's have a look what definition they provide.