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)."

Comments

Imagine

[rks404]

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.

Re:It's about time!

[Bronster]

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.

My experiences with KWord

[Eloquence]

I have tested the previous version of KWord and was quite impressed. Some have argued that KOffice merely duplicates Microsoft's efforts, but that is not true: Unlike MS Word, KWord uses a very simple and efficient frame concept, which makes it quite easy to create complex layouts. For example I was able to create a letter layout with two columns in a couple of minutes with no prior knowledge of the program.

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.

Re:My experiences with KWord

[iso]

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.

This is how any good page layout program does things; Quark Express, InDesign, FrameMaker. After using any decent layout application I find it an absolute chore to do anything besides memos in Word. It's really unfortunate that most people don't realize that there are vastly superior alternatives.

I always knew Word was bad at anything but the absolute basics, but it was made blatantly obvious to me when I did my my latest resume in InDesign. When it comes to layout, Word is quite possibly the worst program for the job, but only a handful of companies will accept my resume in .PDF format. This is despite the fact that I have yet to find one single reason why .DOC would be a better choice than .PDF.

Oh well, that's nothing new. The world is full of frustrating inefficiencies because of the Microsoft monopoly.

- j

KWord can be a good rival to Framemaker /Publisher

[deadmantalking]

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.

Re:A4 paper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know how in the world one can change the default paper size?

Move to Europe.

Re:It's about time!

[iso]

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

Solution to the eternal document-format-problem

[claes]

This is maybe offtopic, but anyways...

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 .doc-files in a directory on the network and converts it do .rtf and writes it to another directory.

Then no MS Office installation is neccessary on the workstations, but converting documents to Koffice/StarOffice/whatever is still easy.