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

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.

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.