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Koffice 1.3 Released
perbert writes "On January 27th, the KDE Project released KOffice 1.3 for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office."
OpenOffice has sat alone at the top of the Free Office Suite application hill for too long. I have been using this product since its alpha stages, and can say without reservations that it has improved by leaps and bounds. The MS Word import filters are alone worth the price of admission (a quick compile on my Gentoo box). The KDE developpers have for a long time now been light years ahead of their open source counterparts. It's good to see that with this release KOffice will finally gain the recognition that it deserves. And with the forthcoming release of KDE 3.2 next week, what more do you need on your open source desktop?
"Especially the support for Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 97 documents has become much better."
I'm no expert, but considering OpenOffice can already open these file formats quite well (they are old), why does KOffice lag behind? I can understand difficulty in writing these files, but for reading them it shouldn't be nearly as difficult. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer the formats from scratch; they can simply read using the method from the GPLed OpenOffice code. Why the difference exactly?
Were Apple to do for Koffice what they did for Khtml, and why wouldn't they, the KDE suite of applications would be very much complete.
Koffice, even if it doesn't attract all the attention of OpenOffice, is light-weight and architecturally sound. Koffice 1.3 is almost there, it just needs a little bit of loving care.
If you are convinced that Apple could be interested in Koffice, consider this.
*Qt applications can run natively under OS X.
*The Mac port of OpenOffice is seriously understaffed and very much behind.
* Koffice's code, due to its componentization, is much easier to maintain and to learn.
*It helps Apple maintain its open source credibility, an intangible asset, but one that shouldn't be dismissed.
*It provides a good trump card against Microsoft or at least some leverage to make sure that they continue to put out a Microsoft Office for the Mac.
*It gives Apple greater control over their destiny, which is one of the main reasons why they created Safari.
---Flame retardant suit is on!
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
"Also new is the ability to import PDF files into KWord and make changes to the document. Support for Microsoft document- formats has improved as well."
Haven't tried it yet, but this feature definitely peaks my interest.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com