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:Filters are proprietary

[bockman]

I remember MS Word format description being published in some MS Web site.
The problem are the undocumented features and the fact that you have always to dance at MS tune to keep compliance with a changing non-standardized format (though doing filters with Very High Level Languages could make things tad easier today ).

As much important as doing filters for MS doc formats is define an easy way for users of differen OSS apps to share their documents (at least defining a better version of RTF, but the best would be to use full standardized document formats).

I'll get hammered, but Internet Explorer 6 is out!

[cybrthng]

Screw my karma, if this was a news for nerds website they would have told the nerds that
Internet Explorer 6.0 is out. http://www.microsoft.com/ie.

It is fast, lean and can i say fast again?

Now back to the topic, Koffice 1.1 is cool, been using the CVS tree for a few weeks. i'm still waiting for the KDE 3/QT 3.0 rewrite before i deploy.

Standard format?

[Eloquence]

Will KOffice support OpenOffice's XML-based file format for saving and loading documents? Besides supporting DOC, it seems like establishing an OS-wide open standard for formatted documents would go a long way to make Linux-based office tools more popular. As more and more apps use it, eventually, Word would have to provide an import filter, too.

Re:I'll get hammered, but Internet Explorer 6 is o

[Eloquence]

Screw my karma, if this was a news for nerds website they would have told the nerds that Internet Explorer 6.0 is out. http://www.microsoft.com/ie. It is fast, lean and can i say fast again?

The typical Slashdotter doesn't hate IE because it is technically inferior. While MS, like Netscape, has a tradition of breaking existing standards with proprietary extensions (ActiveX, special CSS features, VBScript etc.), their browser functions fairly well. There are several reasons not to use it:

• You give Microsoft a lot of control over the content. Unlike many open-source projects, MS is for-profit, and the only reason they give a product of the size of IE away for free is that they plan to make money with the services they will gradually add. Smart Tags is the beginning of that. Every new user supports their position. Every IE user will eventually be a .NET/Passport user.
• Digital Rights Management is of increasing relevance and requires broad support in many applications, especially in the webbrowser (detect copyright flags = don't download file). By giving Microsoft control, you effectively sign away your rights since it is a closed-source project and they may introduce such an extension any day.
• Censorship standards such as PICS can only effectively be adopted in closed-source browsers such as IE which make it effectively impossible to remove them without violating the law (cf. CyberPatrol).
• In a closed source development model, external security review of the browser, an essential component of any modern system, becomes impossible or hard. As the software grows more complex, you have to depend on Microsoft to fix all problems in time -- as compared to depending on a huge community of security specialists who can submit patches.
• As you give more and more control to Microsoft, their proprietary extensions to the web will become a "de facto standard". Eventually they can say "80% of users support technology X" and market technology X that way. This makes it ever harder for competitors to give their users access to a majority of websites. In other words, using IE is the most obvious way to support a browser and OS monoculture. It not only ties you to the browser, it ties you to Windows as well.

IE is not free. Eventually you pay with your freedom of choice and your privacy. That's why we care about the browsers -- not because we hate IE itself (if you throw that much cash at a problem, you are almost bound to come up with a solution). Using IE means signing away your rights for convenience. If that is your choice, fine, but you're on a shaky moral ground if you want the rest of the community to think the same way ("report IE releases!").

Very un-informed

[GauteL]

Star Office is already much more feature-rich than KOffice. The sheer amount of features is probably like 2 to 1 (or even more).

Now you might assume that I do not like KOffice, which is wrong. Microsoft Office and
Star Office actually contain FAR more features than most people ever use.
In fact, most people do not need Microsoft Office, they just buy or pirate it because they THINK they need it. The amount of features is so immense, that it scares people, and make people need COURSES to master the application. Upgrading to new versions of MS Office is for most people totally unnecessary after Office 97.

KOffice have huge potential if they keep on concentrating on making the package easy to use, well integrated with the desktop, and with an acceptable amount of features.
The analogy is almost like Linux vs. Windows. A regular Linux-distribution has an enormous amount of applications and features. Not a single Linux-user has ever needed all of them. Most distributions try to cater for absolutely everyone, and end up alienating the biggest amount of users in the process, the ones that only want to check mail, surf web and write letters.

Gaute

Re:sweet!

[Masem]

There's a good point to this thread.

If we are continuing to try to advocate linux to the standard user, we do need point-n-click installers. Sure, having things that can be done at the command line is nice, but a typical user doesn't want to type much, and trying to remember all the arcane commands can be a problem.

And how many of you want to help your mother run through the rpm/deb process?

But besides the p-n-c installer, we also need some way to allow non-root users to install packages in their home dirs without the need for root to get involved. Obviously, there are some packages that would need root, and so the package manager should be smart enough to have a 'root-only' flag and tell the user that they must tell their sysadmin to install this, so that a system doesn't have 20 copies of apache running around on it. You also need to have a way for the package manager to see if the package is already installed on the system, and let the user know that installation is not needed unless absolutely necessary (say, downgrading or upgrading). Of course, there also has to be quota-watches (don't want someone installing the gimp into a 5meg quota area).

Double-clicking a package icon in whatever file mangaer you are using simply then starts this package manager up. This part is trivial for the current batch of linux fm's.

Of course, the way most packages are packaged, or how a few programs expect access at given locations, this is not a universal solution. But I do believe that such a user-installation tool is going to be another key step in getting linux to joe sixpack.

features DO matter

[abde]

KWord is easily up to the task of generating nice letters, letterheads, memos, faxes and papers, but lacks hyphenation, mail merge (or any database integration) and endnotes/footnotes. Similar stories for the other applications. But, with all due respect to the diligent work of the filter developers, the biggest obstacle to KOffice right now is the filters for MS Office documents.

what's the use of filters for opening Word file formats if the program doesnt support the features? Fine, it's ok if KOffice doesnt have Auto-Hyphen Underlining. But lacking endnotes/footnotes? mail merge is gone? These are SERIOUS problems. It automatically means KOffice is totally useless for any professional academic or business use. What will happen if I try to open my Physics Thesis or my Business Plan word file in KOffice - will it barf when it gets to eth footnotes? mangle it beyond compare?

Features DO MATTER. It's a very sour-grapes attitude to say "sure our open source Office lacks some features, but users dont use them anyway". If all you want out of an Office suite is to type some letters, then you don't need Office, you just need Microsoft Works! but if you want to use an Office suite for true business or academic or professional uses, you need much more features than the average letter writer.

frankly, there's a REASON that Office became the behemoth it is, and that is solely due to features, not monopoly. Remember Wordperfect used to OWN the Office space, and Lotus has a really nice office suite as well. In fact I myself used to be a SAM file diehard, until one day I just realised that the things I wanted, Lotus was dragging its feet on, and Word already had (example - integrated equation editor. advanced font and layout abilities. sectioning and numbering. Automatic tables and figures indexes. list goes on). Other things like support for third party tools like EndNote and MathType. KOffice is still behind even what Lotus and Wordperfect used to have, though I do agree it has a very nice graphic UI. And yet we still accuse the Windows people of liking style over substance?

If you want to do professional business or academic work, there are only two options. TeX or Microsoft Office. Right now, KOffice is still in Microsoft-Works league. Features DO matter and we need them on teh desktop office suite (not the browser :P)

Re:features DO matter

[David Greene]

If you want to do professional...academic work, there are only two options.

Correct.

TeX or Microsoft Office.

Incorrect. (La)TeX or FrameMaker. MS Word is completely inappropriate for scientific academic work and I suspect for most other fields as well. List numbering doesn't work, figures behave horribly and formatting is a pain in the neck. Word may be great for the office, but a professional publishing package it is not.

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.

Why MSOffice filters are a pain

[Fencepost]

I suspect that much of the problem with creating filters for Word and the other MS Office products is that Word documents aren't flat files - they're OLE documents. What that means in practical terms is that each .DOC, .XLS, etc. can be considered its own filesystem in a way with the core drivers for that filesystem included with Windows.

I'm sure a lot of Word docs are very simple internally, but a filter that can't deal with the more complex ones is likely to have acceptance problems.

Finally, is there any possiblility of the StarOffice/OpenOffice filters being used as the basis for more widely available filters? I wasn't all that impressed with them a couple years ago when I tried StarOffice, but if nothing else they might serve as a starting point.

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.