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KOffice 1.1.1 Ships
Dre writes: "The KOffice team has announced the release of KOffice 1.1.1. It's mainly a performance, printing fixes (particularly in KWord) and stability release, but see the ChangeLog for the full scoop. Lots of binary packages are listed in the announcement this time. The dot
is suggesting this might be the last KOffice release before KDE 3.0, which is almost on track for a late-February stable release (the first beta is being released this week)."
It would be nice if KOffice and StarOffice and all the other free Office platforms had some standard document formats that were interoperable. Maybe if they got more popular, we would see something strange like the latest version of MicroSoft Office trumpeting "Compatible with StarOffice and KOffice" as their latest marketing bullet-point.
I sincerely hope that KOffice (and other alternatives) severely push MS-Office from being dominant...
Compatability with other Office Suites is #1 in my point of view.
Especially file format (and even bug) compatibility *sigh*.
I receive far too many documents in M$ Word format for work, and there is no choice but to use Word on Windows if I want to see it as the sender intended. When you're dealing with layouts of forms that have been printed and are in the field, you need to have the exact same form in front of your for data entry system design - and in many other fields it's exactly the same.
To replace Word and Excel you really need something that can handle 99% of all files from those applications, and a way to deal with the others that doesn't leave people who've stored a lot of things in those formats out in the cold.
This is great, but will the new version be able to open Powerpoint 2002 files? I don't think so. People are using Powerpoint 2000/02 files now, which are not compatible with Powerpoint 97. So you'll still have to fork over a bundle of money if you work on presentations with people who use M$ products. Current price for Powerpoint 2002: $93.95. Good deal!
The future isn't what it used to be.
You just draw frames where you want to have text and type in them (if you use frames, you can also use KWord without them like a normal word processor). You can connect frames so that text flows between them, and they are automatically extended to subsequent pages.
Things I haven't yet tested are data connectivity (which is essential for business stuff) and very large documents. But general writing functionality was quite impressive already. The biggest problem I had was printing: I didn't get the result to look like the preview. Reading the summary, I doubt this is fixed, but I'll be pleased to find out I'm wrong. Generally, KWord is on the right track.
I may be talking off my head here, but the last time i saw KWord, it looked like it was inspored by Framemaker. As a technical Writer, Framemaker is the word processor of choice to use, Word does not even come close. Abiword and the word processor shipped with StarOffice are also aimed at the general user, not someone who creates long complex documents for a living.
KWord was a pleasant surprise, then. With KOffice 1.0, it was not ready for primetime use, but the direction it was headed showed that it will sooner or later make it easy for people like me to switch from the pain of FM (yes, it may be the best in the world for tech editing, but it still sucks royally) to something better.
A crank is a little thing that makes revolutions
I must be missing something here.
I want to set Kword to default to "US letter" size paper, and it doesn't "take". Every time it comes up as A4 size.
Does anyone know how in the world one can change the default paper size?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
My windows on my zoomin' fast 700mhz box crapped and I'm sitting here with a copy of windows 2k, xp, rh 7.1, caldera 2.3.. Interesting dilemma.
(writing this on my 486 laptop running win95 WOOT!)
So... What should I go to? I got a better box for games, and I really don't like playing around with linux on a 200mhz 64mb ram machine with a 2 mb vid card.
From those who have - how is koffice compared to the standard MS suite?
What about file compatibility problems (can I take stuff to school?)
Speed - how is star offices speed - I'm assuming x is a lot faster on this box than on the 200, but are there any issues?
Any "major psycotic hatreds"?
Any comments / advice from people who have done the switch?
Thanks.
(website down because 2k is down)
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Personally I still prefer LyX for large technical documents... I'm nearing the end of my internship now, and I've written all my reports in it. I'll be using it for my end paper as well...
;-)
OK, it absolutely took some getting used to, but once I got the hang of it I was suprised at how easy it was to create good looking documents... Most free Office utilities try to mimic the behaviour of commercial applications, while in my opinion the strong point of Linux is the fact that it takes a different approach... on that works...
Same thing goes for document formatting... LyX with LaTex as it's backend may be different from commerical apps, it works like a charm, and I'm definately never going back to the pain of WYSIWYG word processors...
I have spoken!
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
I receive far too many documents in M$ Word format for work, and there is no choice but to use Word on Windows if I want to see it as the sender intended. When you're dealing with layouts of forms that have been printed and are in the field, you need to have the exact same form in front of your for data entry system design - and in many other fields it's exactly the same.
That's going to be extremely difficult--even Word has problems with exact positioning between versions. The root cause is that the DOC file format was never meant for layout data, and most of the layout is dependant on how Word decides to format the content.
This is why if layout is important, people need to use a layout-centric file format like PDF. Open source programmers need to decide on a file format for word processing, and if they're not going to use PDF (an open specification, albeit controlled by Adobe), then they should invent an alternative. XML is great for content, but like HTML and SGML there's really no layout data, which can be important for many documents. Perhaps some type of style-sheets over XML? I've been really impressed with PDF v1.3, but are there (more) open alternatives?
At any rate, the DOC format desperately needs to be replaced. Not only because it's viciously controlled by Microsoft, but also because it's simply an absolute garbage hack of a file format. Either that or DOC should only be used when layout isn't terribly important.
- j
XML is great for content,
Perhaps some type of style-sheets over XML?
You mean something like XSL/XSLT? Why not just get MS to switch to the open file format of OpenOffice?Good luck trying, anyway.
This is maybe offtopic, but anyways...
.doc-files in a directory on the network and converts it do .rtf and writes it to another directory.
We never will get rid of complaints that the newest free office suite can not read the newest MS Office file formats. This is quite natural, but what can be done about it?
I was thinking that maybe it is possible to write a Windows application that automates the task of converting documents by using Word itself. I don't know VB or VB for applications, but is this possible? Is it not true that scriptability is one of the major features of MS Office applications?
If this is technically possible, and Office licensing allows it, then companies could dedicate a server with this program and an Office installation to become a document-transformer. Lets say it reads
Then no MS Office installation is neccessary on the workstations, but converting documents to Koffice/StarOffice/whatever is still easy.
So you paid for Windows and now you feel like they're all yours and nobody else's, eh? :-)
on my zoomin' fast 700mhz box crapped and I'm sitting here with a copy of windows 2k, xp, rh 7.1, caldera 2.3.. Interesting dilemma.
Well, I can tell you what I would do. But you already know what I would do. This is Slashdot, after all. Answer: Install Debian.
Seriously, I think you'd get a lot more out of RH 7.1 than 2K or XP. Why? I've used Linux as a desktop OS for years now, and I made the complete switch last May. I haven't been to Fry's once. So I've saved lots of money. My machine has been up continuously since then, BTW. And I play Tribes2 and RtCW quite a bit. (But I also use Star Office a lot). Now, I've had to ssh into it from another machine in my office to kill -9 a game or whatever, but I never reboot.
As far as the Caldera - RH argument, it's a matter of choice really. RH might be more "dynamic" maybe. It's certainly being updated more. Quite a few RPMs out there too. Go with what you know. Of course, real men use a Linux with apt-get, yada yada yada... (They make you say good things about Debian on /. regardless of the fact that it's all Linux and all good. :-)
(writing this on my 486 laptop running win95 WOOT!)
Ugh. Maybe Linux there as well? RH 5.0 runs fine on my P100 laptop. XMMS streams to the stereo. I tried WinAMP and Win95 on it and it wouldn't even run.
So... What should I go to? I got a better box for games, and I really don't like playing around with linux on a 200mhz 64mb ram machine with a 2 mb vid card.
Oddly enough, you have a machine which is almost perfect for Linux. It's not powerful enough to run the latest MS (or other) apps, yet you could run a minimal Linux install and get added life out of that box as a word processor. Since the box is old, there should be very little wrestling with drivers. As far as GUIs bringing you down, try Blackbox. It's very minimal (yet very full-featured) and should serve you well.
From those who have - how is koffice compared to the standard MS suite?
Well, I use Star Office 6 even at work now. Guy says he wants "powerpoint", I give him slides. Need to look at Excel sheets, I open scalc. As far as KOffice, I don't know. I've had more than once experience where KWord just quit on me. Vanished. No core file, no syslog error, nothing. Just gone. I save a lot when using either it or KWrite (which is worse; KWrite goes down more than a White House intern). I'm using older versions, sure, but I was not too impressed with the stability. Now Kate... wow. There's an editor. Sure, it's plain text, but it's a real good example of a stable app. At least in my experience these last few months. Does syntax highlighting fo0r Perl, C and SQL, too, so that's a big plus. Of course, I've turned in memos/meeting notes, whatever printed two-to-a-sheet with enscript or with line numbers before, so...
What about file compatibility problems (can I take stuff to school?)
You should be able to move files between home and school. Make sure to save in native format (Star Office will ask what format you want to save it in). I've exchanged Word 2000 docs with Star Office 6 and back again. Every once in a while I get a document that saves to like 8MB (when it should be like 400K). A resave helps sometimes.
I haven't been able to get simple Word or Excel macros running. I haven't tried, though. I don't want to run macros if I can help it.
Speed - how is star offices speed - I'm assuming x is a lot faster on this box than on the 200, but are there any issues?
Star Office 5 is about as fast as a wounded prawn. It will literally suck the life force out through your face. One should be paid to use it. The Star Office Beta 6, however, rocks. Worlds better. It has warts, sure, but it's beta. (Do you really think any software -- which had a ship date -- that came out of either Redmond or Mountain View had anything like the QA it should have had?) I've been using beta 6 since it came out and haven't noticed anything overly weird (except a deep-seated and possibly misguided reliance on Java). Me and a few other gus use it for work, so it's good enough I guess.
Any "major psycotic hatreds"?
Visio. I hate Visio. And sometimes I hate project managers, too.
Any comments / advice from people who have done the switch?
I've been using nothing but Linux for months now -- like I said -- and I wouldn't go back. Hell, I couldn't. Deal with XP and it's sugary GUI and nasty licensing/copy "protection"? Not a chance. Pay for Apple hardware? I'll save for my kids college funds instead and run Linux on older hardware. And why not? Linux runs great for me. I love being able to right-click on the desktop and get an xterm where I can write a shell script that goes into cron. Networking works, I have every compiler I'd ever want, a choice of GUIs, lots of customizing, I use ssh tunnels, scp is fine, samba keeps me and the wife in sync, games are fine and I just don't spend any more time or money on the upgrade mill. And BTW, check out Opera for Linux. I've paid for the Win32 and Linux versions of Opera. Everyone who's taken time to look at Opera has loved it, at least in my experience (which is predominantly IE users).
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
A resume is supposed to get your foot in the door. Someone hopes to do that by sending them a resume in a format they either can't or won't read. It does make a point, but while that point is being made, some fellow who bodged a resume together on his girlfriend's Word-laden PC is in talking to HR, not you.
Unless you're a complete superstar, you don't get to say what their HR dept will read. "You want to hire me? Then here's my CV. Oh, really... can't open it? Well, you can download and install a PDF reader for free. PDF is a standard and much better than Word, you know..." It won't fly unless you're a big shot. And if so, then more power to you. Maybe the next guy will get a shot because you already primed the PDF pump...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Well, given the discussion about KWord's use of frames, I can't see that it will be that simple to import KWord into a non frame aware package.
Where things should be better is where there's a closer overlap in functionality between different packages. The first step - where we are now - is to have office packages working on *published* file formats. Following on, a degree of component sharing would make sense (as with the Gecko engine).
At this point the benefit of using free software kicks in with a vengeance, as interoperability issues are of interest to *both* parties rather than a cat and mouse game based around reverse engineering. Extending Bob Young's analogy, you would then find Ford helping BMW to transplant in their engine, rather than suing them for cutting through the welds which hold the bonnet (hood) shut.
Right now Microsoft's most valuable asset is probably the huge and growing base of documents in proprietary file formats, a pernicious form of enslavement. Our blow for freedom must be the use of open formats such as plain text and comma separated lists.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
In the end this will mean a slower progress and probably a rewrite here and there (tables are being redone for the 1.2 release). Maybe you guys can post good bug reports about the little stuff that make an application look 'finished'. Not stuff like "I need this and that". But more like "Hee, this feature could also be done via drag and drop there and there" . You know; the small things we develoipers tend to overlook..
I use Microsoft's Word Viewer to view and print the documents coming in, but refuse to use a full-blown Word installation to create them. So far, no problems, although you do do get some funny looks from clients when you tell them that (and why) you don't use Word on your office PC.
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
for comparison, you'd also need the same numbers for Office.. I have KOffice, but use it only very very rarely... just like I only typed 1 or 2 letters in Word. Also computers often come bundled with WinXP and Office. How many of those users actually use it?
My guess is that daily usage/download will actually be lower than 10%
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
My only experiences with KWord (admittedly limited) have been bad. I've opened a few Word docs in KWord and found them to be a disaster (whereas StarOffice did a 99% good job).
Also, the one time I typed a homework in KOffice and saved as HTML, as soon as I opened the HTML file in vi, I found that it contained nothing but "<html>". If I can't assume that pressing "Save" will save my file, then it's really not so useful to me.
>read ones make the reader's life more
>difficult and get thrown. Equally, don't send in
>a coffee stained paper copy (or virus infected
>email copy
>unprofessional.
Many years ago, at 18, I had been hired by a startup to write software. We needed changes in some firmware, and I told them that my change to part time for the school year would prevent me from doing that *and* keeping up with the MIS system.
I'd been hired on the spot when I showed up. I didn't know better than simply to appear with my resume in hand, rather than mailing it in. I was abe to show them something they desparately wanted, and they realized they could have me full time for less than a part time consultant.
Anyway,they handed me the folders of resumes collected when they had advertised, and told *me* to find someone.
I was shocked by some of them. I'd always heard about the importance of appearance, etc., but I just wasn't prepared.
The one that I can still picture had been printed on a crummy (even for the time) dot matrix printer--the kind swhere the dots were distinct with space between them. It had then been copied on a crummy photocopier, and was quite grey. To top it off (really, I'm not making this up) the cover letter was written on *graph paper* in pencil . . .
hawk
I used lyx, and found an existing isu.sty program. My time? Less than 10 minutes . . .
hawk
Because some partners and clients who are still using Office 95/97 (and even 2k itself) sometimes couldn't open our Office files, we now only send stuff in pdf (automatic conversion through a linux virtual shared printer and ps2pdf).
Know of anything that will work for AutoCAD 14 .dwg files and AutoDesk Inventor files? (either to DXF or to .pdf) -- I'd love to be able to provide that same functionality to people who use our drawings. Yeah you can save to .dxf but that's a pain for the draftsmen who have a zillion drawings around WITHOUT having dupes in .dxf format.
I think for KOffice it is going to be way way lower, like 1%.
My resume is ALWAYS handed to the employer in a nice folder.
Let me guess, you were that nimrod in high school who always padded the shit out of his papers but put them in a nice plastic dust jacket, weren't you?
--saint
The way it's setup here, it works with anything that can print. We do use AutoCAD LT 98 with it too. It's quite transparent for the users, and for the application.
nonono... this is for an automated system in our intranet. i.e. customer wants to see/play with drawing without downloading the entire thing. Yeah I know Acrobat creator can print to pdf; that's not quite what we need (unless it is perhaps possible to script it out from a network connection...)
The problem with the readers (voloview et al) is that they only work for Windows; there's no decent dwg viewer for Linux that I have been able to find, so I'm trying to find a good convertor. :-)
That's going to be extremely difficult--even Word has problems with exact positioning between versions. The root cause is that the DOC file format was never meant for layout data, and most of the layout is dependant on how Word decides to format the content.
.doc (at least we have Spreadsheet::WriteExcel for non-graph reporting!)
Oh, I absolutely agree - but it has to be close enough to the current version that KWord users can read files from M$Word in a way that covers most of the not-too-complex things, and write files in a format that M$Word can understand (doesn't have to be Doc - MSHTML would be fine too, so long as it's transparent to the Microsoftie).
Also, Excel (including graphs) needs to be supported, and Powerpoint presentations for the suits - luckily I don't have to deal with too much Powerpoint at the moment.
This is why if layout is important, people need to use a layout-centric file format like PDF...
Sure, that would be nice - it doesn't alter the fact that at the moment, most people are using M$Word, and any program that can't talk to M$Word in most cases I deal with isn't worth the effort - I have a job to get done, and I can't spend the time wandering up to the lone Windows NT server in the machine room (running some custom VB App which talks to a voice-phone-program of some sort - I ignore it except to restart it when the VB program crashes - it's not very well written unfortunately, but we don't have time to fix/replace it).
As I was saying - I don't have time to spend 20 minutes converting a file every time someone sends me something in a Microsoft format. Until KOffice can fill that gap, I have no choice but to continue working in with
Perhaps the best strategy is to sendt the document back to the sender, telling them to save it in the file format of your choice.
Perhaps the best solution is to live in the real world for a bit. Business involves compromises, and one of these is that you deal with the shit that paying customers dump on you (to a degree) or you don't get paid - file formats is only a part of this (ever dealt with changing specs, badly designed schemas and last minute reporting changes. I can tell you that telling your customers to f**k off until they fix their requirements is a great way to get fired by a company that doesn't want to go out of business because of Prima Donna numero Uno.)
I personally prefer electronic format. Much easy to sort & grep. Did any one worked on IBM SP2, quick
.txt & .html resumes off mine. When at a job interview the only thing I had was a
:-). That is the first sign, that you can not follow instructions.
grep -il SP2 resumes/*.txt resumes/*.html
is all I need.
Paper is easy on eyes, but a nightmare to quickly find the infor you need (specially when you have 200 resumes for a job opening).
I have a
a2ps resume.txt
output of mine, and the interviewers _loved_ it. I was told it is the quality of the work you did that matter, not how pretty you can format your resume.
If I get a resume in a folder printed on colored paoper, I'd be suspicious about it. We all know how we look for jobs. WE apply to about 50 jobs a day. If yoru resume is a close match, then you 'stand-out' in your interview. That is what they are there for. I never judge how serious some one about a job just b/c they handed me a laminated resume. I wait till I talk to the guy.
And hell yes, when I ask please only send txt/html resumes, everything else is tossed out (another reason why I love electronic format
On the subject of gaming, how is it you're going about playing windows games? I'd like to make the final switch, and now that I've finally used SO 6 (which rocks my world, aside from needing to disable the damned help system) I don't really need Windows for much besides games.
So, are you using transmeta, wine, or something I'm not aware of? I'd love to get some advice on this one. The more I move to Linux, the happier I am.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I don't anything about AutoCad, dwg or dxf but I noticed this on apps.kde.com the other day:
Linux Drawing ViewerAnyway, scriptability is kind of beside the point. Yes, you can use VB (or any other COM-aware language) to access the data in MS-office files. But that doesn't really solve any major problems. There are any number of ways to access this data. Sometimes COM scripting is the easiest way, but it's never the only way.
So if getting the data out of the files isn't a problem, what is? The problem is that the data is extremely complex. There's all kinds of information embedded in the file -- font names, paragraph parameters, widow-orphan control, stylesheet definitions... You can get a taste of how complex Office documents are by looking at the specification for Rich Text Format, which attempts (not always successfully) to represent a Microsoft Word file in plain text. It's also instructive to dump a Word document to HTML. Use Word 2K or XP -- earlier versions didn't preserve as much formatting detail.
To have a reliable two-way exchange between two word processors, you have to define and implement a mapping between every possible combination of text and formatting in one WP to the some combination in the other WP. And that mapping has to be one to one! Otherwise people can't trade their documents without losing stuff.
It can't be done. It requires that the two WPs have roughly equivalent feature sets, which is unheard of. And even if you can somehow force your users to stick to a common feature subset, implementing the mapping is mind-bogglingly complex.
The basic problem is documents that intermingle content and formatting. Once you separate content and formatting (using, for example, XML for content and XSL or CSS for formatting) you've drastically simplified the problem, and you can start talking about application-independent documents.