KOffice 1.1 Rolls Out

Andreas "Dre" Pour wrote to say that KDE's long-awaited version 1.1 is out, and asks you to check the dot for some more details. He also points to this temporary fixed-for-Netscape announcement as well as the official announcement. Dre continues: "The dot link includes commentary by me (including a call for Open Source office developers to collaborate on filters!)"

Comments

Re:"Fixed for Netscape?"

[keesh]

There is a difference between writing proper HTML and writing HTML that NS / IE / Konqy / Whatever will render correctly.

Re:"Fixed for Netscape?"

[dfaure]

No, there was a bug in the HTML of the official announcement (PHP footer missing), and Netscape choked on the resulting HTML, but Konqueror parsed it alright. Another good point for Konqueror, if you ask me ;)

Anyway, the official announcement is fixed now, it shows up in Netscape too.

The LyX way ...

[bockman]

While I am glad for any improvement of Linux office tools, I would like that WordProcessor designer would consider the good points of LyX approach to creating document, namely What You See Is What You Mean.

What I like of LyX:

• contents is separated from presentation; the users specify the semantic of the document and the computer (instructed by layout programmers) does the typesetting; this ensure uniform document appearance and less headhaches reformatting documents;
• The on-screen appearance of a document is not forced to be equal to the on-paper appearance, as well as it carries its semantic value.

Things that I would like added to LyX:

• A graphical layout editor for people that like me don't know TeX;
• An open-source layout repository (I know there is one for TeX/LaTeX but ... see point above).
• Better on-screen presentation: some of the document semantic is not well represented in the on-screen presentation; some is a bit ugly.

Re:features DO matter

[naeger]

Hi,

there is one alternative you forgot when saying TeX or Office are the only options: LyX (www.lyx.org) combining the best of TeX and WYSIWYG.

Currently, the LyX team is working on GUI independence. Once this is accomplished, there will be several frontends (xforms, QT, GTK) and LyX could be easily integrated in KOffice. Then you've got Kword for letters, memos and the like and K-LyX for your professional needs (thesis, scientific papers, ...). I am looking forward to this !!! LyX is the KILLER app when it comes to professional document processing!

Information on File Formats

[Fencepost]

Apparently information on the Word file formats either is or was available on MSDN. I pulled up a 560K HTML file spec from Wotsit's Format, a file format information site.

Also of interest may be LAOLA, which is "a collection of documentations and perl programs dealing with binary file formats of Windows program documents." The link to that came from Wotsit's as well.