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."

Comments

been using openoffice

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

for cross-platform goodness, i like openoffice.. runs great on win32 as well as linux & freebsd

Re:been using openoffice

[diersing]

Agreed. I rather see the office suite developers of the world unite and improve OpenOffice. Personally, I've never like the KDE Office suite and most distro's include OO as the default.

Re:been using openoffice

[$calar]

Your opinion is the common one I think. But I think that OOo tends to be bloated and slow on my system. It's a great suite with many features, don't get me wrong, but I think that a more integrated solution is necessary. I have been using Abiword because it's pretty light on startup time and looks good with my GNOME interface. Yes, OOo is going to be having the native widget set, but will that lead to reduced startup times? Probably not.

Yeah, Abiword has its problems, but I think it's better in the long run (for me). I think KOffice isn't as mature as GNOME Office (Maybe with 1.3, this statement is wrong), but I think people are putting a lot of stock in OpenOffice and I'm not totally impressed.

Re:been using openoffice

[Leomania]

I'm also an OpenOffice.org user; editing an Excel spreadsheet on Solaris now, in fact. The importance of its cross-platform capabilities can't be overstated; it's simply da bomb. I use it on every platform I have except for Mac (that X11 version was just too horendous to look at).

With that said, it starts up incredibly slowly even on Windows, where it starts faster than anywhere else (for me, at least). Its memory footprint is pretty darned big, and even the toolkit being used to make the toolbars and such are noticably slow. While I'm sure there are many features that folks want to see added to OOo, I for one hope the startup speed and memory usage get some work.

Still, I'll check out KOffice 1.3 in the next distro that bundles it in. If it's significantly faster, I'll probably use it sometimes as long as I can get back into OOo when I'm done.

- Leo

Re:been using openoffice

[Smallpond]

I kind of liked the fact that it installed in less than 10 seconds. I can't use it for production-quality manuals, but I can pop it up, edit a document and print it before oo has finished loading.

Re:been using openoffice

[eean]

Well making things less bloated is always a good thing, it really shouldn't be a high priority given that computers are only going to get faster.

I find oowriter to be pretty complete feature wise, but it suffers from the same sorts of problems that all word processors I've used have. Cumbersome use with things like bullets, tables etc.

Re:been using openoffice

[cozziewozzie]

Well, the OO.o and KOffice people are working toward a single file format, which will be shared between them, and hopefully become the next standard, cross-office-suite format. The KOffice people are currently working on adopting this format as their native format.

The result of this will be that all open source office suites (and all office suites who wish so) will be able to seamlessly open each others' documents. This is a step in the right direction: You standardise on the file format and choose the tools freely. More information at the OpenOffice XML page.

This will also bring all the OpenOffice import filters to KOffice, which has so far been its biggest problem. For most light office work, I find KOffice to be much more enjoyable than OO.

Too many office choices on Linux now!

[ChiralSoftware]

Let's see, OpenOffice, Textmaker, Microsoft Office, KOffice, Kingsoft... what else? It seems that there are now more office choices for Linux than for Windows. Fortunately all except Microsoft Office seem to be moving towards the StarOffice XML format so we can have one file format that works on all of them.

Re:Too many office choices on Linux now!

[RLW]

Don't do that!
Microsoft is patenting word processor document based XML files!
M$FT owns XML format for word processors

Re:Too many office choices on Linux now!

[grqb]

As a fairly new Linux user, I find that too much choice makes it hard to learn and it's true for lots of other types of software too. I know competition is advantageous and all but I think it would help to focus development on say 2 office choices that were in competition...competition like that between gnome and kde is good.

Re:Too many office choices on Linux now!

[cozziewozzie]

Well, since KWord has been using XML for word processor file format since forever, I don't think that they can claim ownership over all XML-based format, only their own.

This can only be a good thing

[Tim_F]

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?

Re:This can only be a good thing

[gr8_phk]

Oh sure. When people use or try to improve GNOME, they are flamed because KDE is obviously superior and has won the competition. Yet KDE fans are supposed to support KOffice when clearly OpenOffice.org has won that competition.

FANatics...

Re:This can only be a good thing

[bluGill]

OpenOffice.org won? Not in all areas. I find kWord works much better than the openOffice product for my personal use. Not perfect, but I prefered it. I learned FrameMaker though, and kWord is designed more like that, so that explains a lot.

I have openOffice, it does a better job of MSword importing (as of the last version...), but it is slow on my old system, and "doesn't feel right". However as I havn't used it much I don't really have a valid opinion.

kOffice is very nice. It might not be as good as OpenOffice, but that doesn't mean it is bad. Try both. In a few years try both again and see how things have changed.

Re:This can only be a good thing

[alexborges]

The MS Word import filters are alone worth the price of admission (a quick compile on my Gentoo box).

What are you, on a cray?

Re:This can only be a good thing

[jrcamp]

OpenOffice has nothing to do with GNOME. It doesn't use any of their framework or integrate any more than it does with KDE. So why do GNOME claim it as their flagship office product? Stick with your Gnumeric et al. :)

Re:This can only be a good thing

[dreamchaser]

OpenOffice has nothing to do with GNOME. It doesn't use any of their framework or integrate any more than it does with KDE. So why do GNOME claim it as their flagship office product? Stick with your Gnumeric et al. :)

Maybe because it does the job well and they didn't have to reinvent the wheel? Still, I agree that it's good to have choices out there, so the improvements to KOffice are only a Good Thing.

Re:This can only be a good thing

[Alan]

Probably similar to the "god made the world in 7 days where 1 day is any length of time" argument. I think it took 24h+ on my k7-900 a while back.

Re:This can only be a good thing

[DarkSarin]

Yes, but computers are much faster now...

if you own one. Honestly, I can't get gentoo to install, so the point is moot.

Re:This can only be a good thing

[Brandybuck]

My thoughts exactly. I started compiling when I came home from work. The next morning it wasn't finished. But it was when I got home that evening. So it took between sixteen to twenty four hours. Hardly a "quick" compile.

I don't know if the minimal speed improvements I;ve noticed for an optimized build versus the default i386 package are worth it.

Re:This can only be a good thing

[ykardia]

Openoffice:a quick compile on my Gentoo box???

You've GOT to be kidding. Last time I compiled OO it took up 3 GB of disk space for temporary files, and it ran overnight. And yes, that was on a Gentoo box. I guess that's what you get for trying to be a Real Geek (TM):
Hah! Install binaries? That's nothing! When I was a lad, we used to live in a septic tank and COMPILE OUR OWN SOFTWARE - it took years, and we were happy!.

Next time, I am getting the binary...

Re:This can only be a good thing

[DickBreath]

OpenOffice.org won?

OpenOffice.org runs on Windows and has a thriving user community. Just visit OOoForum.org or OOoDocs.org, or OOoMacros.org, or OOExtras.org. Visit the main www.openoffice.org web site and see just how large it is.

I can and have written extensive macros for OpenOffice.org in multiple languages. OOo has a well documented API.

Re:This can only be a good thing

[bluGill]

Microsoft office runs on Windows and has a thriving use community. Many people write macros for it...

Seriously though, OpenOffice.org is nice. There is however plenty of room for Koffice. Even more when you realize that there are often mutually incompatable ways of programing something, and the two projects take different roads when they apply, while working togather when they don't.

RTF

[Carnildo]

Do they yet have a functional RTF import? That's the thing I've found missing from entirely too many Linux office suites and word processors.

Re:RTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they yet have a functional RTF import?
No, but I have working RTFM module as man pages viewer, if you are interested.

Re:RTF

[Josh Booth]

I agree. Once RTFA is better supported, maybe Slashdotters will actually RTFA when presented in the RTFA format. Wait, RTF, oh...

Re:RTF

[JabberWokky]

Yes, and they have for awhile. There's also a Word DOC import, but the export is RTF.

--
Evan

Re:RTF

[bogie]

Exactly what are these "too many" Linux office suites? There are only 3 Linux offices suites of note from the last 3 years. Gnome Office, OpenOffice.org, and KOffice. Gnome Office aka abiword has had rtf import for years and so has OO. In fact IIRC koffice actually did have rtf in its early versions. Yea Koffice has lacked in the import filter department, but every other Linux Office app I know of has had rtf import ability since the 90's. Heck even ones from 4 years ago like applixware, Star office, and Wordperfect for Linux could do this. Linux Office suites may be lacking in several areas, but basic rtf import ability has never been one of them.

Got .torrent?

[nocomment]

Anyone have a .torrent for this? I imagine the server is going to slow down a lot. and to be a little offtopic...how do yo umake .torrents? Perhaps we can just make one? OR is that possible?

Re:Got .torrent?

[kilbo]

A quick guide to making .torrents is here or for Windows here

Re:Got .torrent?

[mrogers]

No, .torrents cannot be made, although there has recently been significant progress in the field of .torrent synthesis. But for the moment, .torrents must be mined out of the ground by sweaty men in coolie hats, refined in a stinking blast furnace, cut, polished and finally released onto the internet. Kind of like the way RPMs are made, but with less government regulation.

Is this Redundant?

[mauriatm]

So which should I use? KDE Based OpenOffice or KOffice?

Previous versions of KOffice left a lot to be desired. And I was finding OO a bit too sluggish on old computers. Abiword seemed to be pretty decent though.

Re:Is this Redundant?

[jonbryce]

If you want a feature complete competitor to MS Office then use oo.o. If you want a well designed, fast, but not yet complete suite to try out, and contribute to the development process, then use koffice.

Re:Is this Redundant?

[AvitarX]

You should use AbiWord and Gnumeric.

If you need power pointish stuff you need Crossover office.

I am not trying to troll. I much prefer KDE to gnome, maybe the ugly icons everyone complains about are just easier for me. Also the trqagable partial title bars in the B3 decoration are joyous for me.

But AbiWord is IMHO the best office clone for simple projects. It is snappy, has a cute ant splashscreen and types letters as well as office (for anything more then that use scribbus, that's what it is for).

I use gnumeric because when the two projects started (Koffice, Gnome office) Gnumeric was the most complete spreadsheet.

currently they both pretty much do what I need with stability. That is let nme add and multiply and divide lots of shit, but I stick to gnumeric because my expense sheet has a useless Macro that craps out Kspread, but works (is ignored by) gnumeric. All the macro does is multiply fields so I can make the spreadsheet do that.

Kword is based on FrameMaker and is thus foreign if you are used to MS office (it used to be anyway) and is touted as more powerful for that reason. Of course if you need something more powerful then AbiWord it is probably worth moving up to Scribbus.

KDE still kicks Gnomes ass as a destop though. Only because Konquerer is awsome, slidable short title bars are great, and the Gome save box sucks ass.

Also previously in Gome there was serious issues to saving into the desktop folder (wich was also hidden). Files would take quite a while to show up, and update their size while downloading. This was not a problem if you were using Nautolous to put stuff there, but otherwise it blew.

That is probably fixed now, but I still like Konquror too much to even check.

KOffice vs Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

I find KO to be more user friendly and less buggy than OO. Too bad it lacks the MS compatibilty of OO for Power Point

Re:KOffice vs Open Office

[xutopia]

and MS Word, oh and Excel too!

Re:KOffice vs Open Office

[dotwaffle]

OO doesn't have bugs, it has features... No wait, I'm getting confused... Microsoft DOESN'T own a patent on office apps. Shame really, I was up for some Microsoft bashing then. We're concentrating too much on Darl and not enough on Bill! It's Darl's evil plan!

Re:KOffice vs Open Office

[bogie]

Buggy? Slow, Big YES. But buggy? No, not really. KOffice has the integration thing down, but its well behind OO functionality wise and isn't cross platform.

Re:KOffice vs Open Office

[Roberto]

Other than Mac, Windows and Unix, what else do you need?

Sure, it uses X on Windows, but OO uses X on Mac.

Thats good and all...

[cartzworth]

...until MS gets their Office XML patents. :|

I really enjoy KDE thanks for the great job people

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to admit that KDE is getting better and better with every release. It's good to see that the leading Open Source Desktop is having such a huge success. I like it's simplicity, easy to use. Not to mention that it's in many parts better than Microsoft WindowsXP or similar solutions.

GNOME is also a nice Desktop solution but has a very long way to reach the same functionality, integration, quality and easy to use as KDE offers today. The developers should start making it stable and usable for the endusers rather than 'hacking' around in it with no serious visible target for the enduser.

If only

[deliciousmonster]

We could make the OS that runs the fully supportive suite more like Windows... without the penchant for taking in trojan horses and attempting to destroy it's user base, of course...

Speculation

[daeley]

On a Mac OS X note, I'm hoping the speculation is true, that Apple might do with KOffice what it did with Konq/Safari and turn it into the next generation of AppleWorks.

Re:Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Since KOffice is GPL, they would be forced to open the source code to their entire application. It couldn't be where they take the LGPL KHTML and link things to it, only publishing the changes to the core KHTML. Thus, Linux would benefit from having an "Apple-quality" office suite. Apple is most likely reluctant to pour many hours into GPL code... which others could copy to neutralize the gain on the Apple platform. But even if it did become a standard across PC and Mac, it would be better than having MS control the Mac productivity suite. Then, Apple would be controlling both worlds... similar to iTunes/Quicktime/etc. (of course, a QT port to windows has yet to be seen, and since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license. You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development. We really need a LGPL'd QT implementation)

Re:Speculation

[Trillan]

I found a blog entry on a possible Aqua port, but it doesn't seem to be integrated into the builds yet.

Re:Speculation

[Florian]

I doubt that. Apple already has its own presentation program and therefore no use for KPresenter. Despite having greatly processed, KWord still doesn't feel like a production app, has an overally awkward user interface, much inferior import filters to OpenOffice and, at least in the past, insufficient stability. It is therefore not nearly as attractive as the base of a potential "iWord" as KHTML was for Safari. Abiword, which would be an alternative, also lacks reliability and compatibility, and OpenOffice is a monster that Apple would avoid for the same reasons it avoided Mozilla.

Also, KWord is built on top of KDE's component/toolkit architecture that is a world apart from MacOS X Carbon/Cocoa API. While Qt allows a native port to Aqua, it does not offer a native port to Carbon or Coca, and Apple is unlikely to establish a third desktop API on its platform just for the sake of getting a functionally rather limited word processor that, at the moment, has no dramatic advantage over the old Claris/AppleWorks offering.

And keep in mind that for Safari, Apple just used the engine (KHTML) of a free program, not the GUI application (konqueror) itself, in the same way it put its own (proprietary) GUI on top of Mach and BSD. From I experience, I doubt that KWord and Abiword are, in their present state, as attractive as "engines" as BSD and KHTML were. If it all, Abiword seems a more likely candidate since it's designed as a cross-plattform application and, quite in opposition to KWord, focuses on getting base functions and usability right before acquiring more nifty/hackerish features such as frame-based page layout and importing PDF files.

What makes your scenario very unlikely in the end are licensing issues. KOffice and Abiword are GPLed code and thus would require Apple to release any program based on them under the GPL. Which doesn't fit to the company's successful tactics of putting slick, but proprietary GUIs on top BSD- or LPGL-licensed hacker code like BSD and KHTML. A GPLed "iWord" that could be ported back to Linux and even Windows would, unlike the current i-apps, be no exclusive selling point for MacOS X.

-F

Re:Speculation

[LMCBoy]

Since KOffice is GPL, they would be forced to open the source code to their entire application. It couldn't be where they take the LGPL KHTML and link things to it

I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.

Now, assuming you are not the CEO of the company, why exactly is this a desireable situation again? The above seems like an unequivocally bad deal for the community of developers, and I say, thank goodness the GPL prevents such shenanigans.

since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license

If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit? TT is gracious enough to allow free (beer and speech) usage of Qt for noncommercial uses, and their commercial license fees are by most accounts very reasonable. It isn't as if they are starved for customers.

You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development

What the hell are you talking about? Assuming you aren't referring to illegal MS application development, can you please explain this? How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?

Re:Speculation

[adrianbaugh]

They might still have a reason to support it, if only to damage people's dependency on Microsoft products. If the average person were less tied to their MS Office computer they might be a little more inclined to investigate the competition as regards operating systems too.
I don't say they'll do it, but there might be a little more at stake here than profit.

Re:Speculation

[squiggleslash]

If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit? TT is gracious enough to allow free (beer and speech) usage of Qt for noncommercial uses, and their commercial license fees are by most accounts very reasonable. It isn't as if they are starved for customers.

Proprietary, not commercial. You can have open source/free commercial software, and non-commercial proprietary software.

Trolltech allows royalty-free use of QT under the conditions of the GPL. If you want to sell your GPL'd end-product, that's fine, as long as the terms of the GPL are adhered too.

Note I am not commenting on how viable commercial GPL software is, merely pointing out there's a difference.

Re:Speculation

[Deraj DeZine]

What the hell are you talking about? Assuming you aren't referring to illegal MS application development, can you please explain this? How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?

Well, MinGW is an option can be setup as a cross-compiler under Linux and I think the API headers are easy enough to get. This doesn't really cover what you mentioned, but I thought I'd point it out anyway. So your point there still stands, mostly.

Re:Speculation

[mandolin]

Simply put, developers, and not /. posters, get to pick if they think corporate "leeching" of code is an issue. Some developers couldn't care less, and some are happy to see their work used more widely. More liberal licensing can also be a strategic plus when it's important to promote a standard rather than a piece of code. Consider Ogg Vorbis or the BSD TCP/IP stack.

I'm sure there are motives I've missed as well. Although I'd personally lean towards the LGPL for anything I'd write.

Re:Speculation

[LMCBoy]

Are you replying to me or the parent post? I would say I 100% agree; the KOffice developers have chosen the GPL as their license, and it isn't the parent poster's place to lament that it isn't more "liberal".

Re:Speculation

[luisdom]

I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.

That's not what happened with KHTML. They gave a lot back to the community, not only in the code area; they also gave their colaboration in merging their changes to KHTML back to Konqueror's. The result is a good browser for apple, and a better browser for all of us.
What I don't get is that you praise TT's attitude (which I agree) and don't praise apple's. It's more or less the same: make money while contributing quality code.

Re:Speculation

[zangdesign]

The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.

So, right out of the box, you assume Apple (inferred from context in relation to grandparent post) is going to screw the Open Source community because they're a corporation? That's pretty unfair, considering that Apple has been pretty decent about giving back to the codebase they share with Konqueror.

You have exactly - repeat, exactly - the same opportunity to screw over the community that Apple or anyone else does - actually, a better opportunity. No one cares who you are right now - there aren't a million little eyes just hoping that you will step out of line just once so it will confirm their pet suspicions.

Get over it. Some corporations are bad, some are not so bad. Apple may not be perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than much larger and better funded corporations out there. Why assume they're guilty before they've even done anything?

Re:Speculation

[IamTheRealMike]

If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit?

There's a huge stack of excellent code on the typical desktop, yet nobody else requires the sort of licensing TrollTech do. If you're going to take that position for Qt, why not also take it for the Linux kernel, glibc, libpng, Xlibs, Cocoa, Java, .NET etc.

How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?

You can get the Platform SDK for free (with free updates) here.

Yes, you need a license to use Windows (not much use otherwise, is it?) but that's different to needing a license to develop for the platform which Microsoft has never required.

Having said that, Windows is not a good development platform out of the box, so they still make money by selling some rather spiffy tools to make developers lives easier.

Re:Speculation

[cozziewozzie]

Actually, Apple is giving back all their improvements to the KHTML team. Safari is really nothing but a thin container for the KHTML engine. So Linux certainly has an Apple-quality browser and that doesn't seem to concern Apple. Why wouldn't they allow Linux to have an Apple-quality office suite, especially when KOffice is better than AppleWorks?

Of course you need to buy a license for MS application development. You need to buy Visual Studio and a copy of Windows. Whether it's commercial development or not.

Re:Speculation

[cozziewozzie]

There is an Aqua port (if you count running on native Qt/Mac), and the Dot reported on it. There is an article about it in eWeek. You can even get the binaries on the kde.opendarwin.org page.

Sure, it's a bit rough around the edges, but it is certainly coming along nicely!

Re:Speculation

[cozziewozzie]

Calling frame-based page layout a nifty/hackerish feature built on top of a word-processor is a bit like calling 3d modelling a nifty/hackerish feature built on top of an image manipulation program. E.g.:

"I think that the GIMP people have right approach in getting the basic photo processing done first before adding the nifty 3d modelling capability of Autocad. I mean, Autocad is useless for touching up my photo album."

Frame-based layout and text-based word processing are different paradigms and they are design decisions made at the beginning of a project and not tacked on in the middle of it.

Re:Speculation

[LMCBoy]

There's a huge stack of excellent code on the typical desktop, yet nobody else requires the sort of licensing TrollTech do. If you're going to take that position for Qt, why not also take it for the [other projects]?

As someone else in this thread put it: Developers, and not /. posters, get to pick how their code is licensed. I respect the licensing decisions that Trolltech, Linus, RMS, the X consortium, Apple, Sun, etc. have made, and furthermore, I understand the motivation in Trolltech's case. Sure it would be nicer for commercial developers if the license was less restrictive toward proprietary use, but unlike every other developer you and I have discussed, TT is a company whose core business is this piece of software. They can't give it away to everybody because they aren't a volunteer community, and they aren't a company selling hardware. I understand that. I think opening it up to non-proprietary use is a fantastic and noble thing for them to do, and my hat's off to them for it.

Re:Speculation

[LMCBoy]

You're right. It was great that Apple chose to use KHTML and that in doing so, it joined our community and played by our rules. Kudos to them!

I will be equally impressed and gratified if they choose to join us again with developing KOffice. That will be a great day, because KOffice is always starved for developer eyeballs. However, I don't see why KOffice needs to give up the protection of the GPL for this to happen. It's not like KHTML, where Apple can easily link proprietary code to a basic KOffice foundation. That's not practical; KOffice isn't a library.

Re:Speculation

[LMCBoy]

Sorry I gave that anti-corporate impression. The point I was trying to make is that Apple can choose to help with KOffice or not, but I don't think that making the license for KOffice less restrictive to try to seduce them into doing so would be a good move for KOffice. If you lowered the barrier against proprietary use of the codebase, sure you might attract additional corporate developers, but you wouldn't gain anything from it (if they were going to give back, they would have joined up when it was Free Software, no?)

It's not like KHTML. KOffice can't be easily linked to other code that you can keep private. So I don't think that making KOffice LGPL'd would change anything. To get the situation originally advocated would require something like BSD, IIUC.

Re:Speculation

[luisdom]

Well, it could be something like Open Office and Star Office... Put a commercial grammar/spell checker, a collection of cliparts, and 1-year support and there you have. Something you can sell and still beneficial for the OSS community.
It's just an idea, though.

Re:Speculation

[mandolin]

I was specifically replying to:

I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.

Apparently I misinterpreted its meaning. Wouldn't be the first time. Glad we're in violent agreement :-)

Damn monopolists

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the Department of Justice investigates the damn Kompany and their practices of bundling KOffice with KDE. Such practice should be forbidden as consumers are left with no choice and Kompany sheds out the competition, driving OpenOffice, Sun and Microsoft from lucrative market represented by KDE users.

Kool!

[Fookin]

I'll have to try this tonight when I get out of work ...

Fun for Gentoo

[GweeDo]

Get the build here

Be sure to do: emerge koffice-1.3.ebuild digest

Then emerge it and enjoy :)

Re:Fun for Gentoo

[gnu-generation-one]

Any idea of the easiest way to upgrade Mandrake installation to use this?

I seem to remember investigating K* before, and their (Kmail's) approach was "go and ask whoever makes your distro". Has anyone done the install on the Drake without resorting to weird compiler options?

Re:Fun for Gentoo

[GweeDo]

You only have to build a digest because this ebuild isn't in the official portage tree. Had it been in the gree a simple emerge koffice would suffice...or if you are really stupid you could just use one of the gui portage browsers and "click" the install button. You really should consider learning before you speak...other wise you look like an idiot.

Powerpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

KOffice 1.3's presenter offers much improved support for powerpoint features than previous versions. However, good support for links and enter/exit effects is still lacking. The inability to play powerpoint presentations reliably on anything but powerpoint is keeping us locked to MS Office and Windows.

Cross platform = :)

[stfvon007]

I perfer the Open office because its cross platform, as I have a dual-boot machine(well 5x boot) and though I have MS office (needed to get the formatting perfect for those perfectionist profs that ding you for being 1/16 of an inch off in margins (prof required documents be submitted electronicly in .doc format), and for combinations of drawing+text wich open office still dosnt have good compatability with (the text stays in place while the images get all scrunched so they dont match up at all)Its been getting better but is not perfect.

MikeRoweSoft!

[Pro_Piracy_Guy]

"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."

They just used MikeRoweSoft in a sentence!!! Sue, them!! Sue, them!! Quickly!!

he's got a point

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one award* Koffice has received.

*Real awards, not "The North Haverbrook Linux Users Group Best Office Suite That Isn't One Of the Other Ones Award"

Re:he's got a point

[The Analog Kid]

It said award winning KDE, not Koffice specifically, and in that case what real awards has KDE won?

Re:he's got a point

[thorsen]

You can see the awards won by KDE on the KDE awards page.

Bo.

I don't quite get...

[deitel99]

"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?

Re:I don't quite get...

[Anonymous Coward]

Openoffice code has an interesting history. It was originally commercial staroffice code, and was later opened. It would take considerable time to decrypt the openoffice code and rewrite a neat implementation for KOffice. Obviously it is started, but still has work to go.

Re:I don't quite get...

[Just Some Guy]

My understanding is that it's not so much the file parsing that's difficult, it's fitting the resulting data into your application's object model. The KOffice people may have a good understand of the Office format, but it may not be a perfect fit onto their internal data structures.

Re:I don't quite get...

[not_cub]

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?

Perhaps reading the files themselves isn't as hard as mapping them onto your own representation of a document. OpenOffice seems to have been reasonably like Office from the time I first saw it around '99 I believe (as StarOffice). KDE is effectively a design from scratch, although various things come out working similarly, because they are reasonable design decisions. As a consequence, even though the open world knows the data format of Word files to a large extent, reading them into KOffice is still hard.

This wild guess bought to you by not_cub.

Re:I don't quite get...

[Carewolf]

I know libgsf is somewhere in the dependency-chain of the MS-office filters for KOffice. Don't know if it is used though.

KOffice uses wvware2 and libwmf, which are now shared by abiword and koffice.

Re:I don't quite get...

[Brandybuck]

Bingo. KWord is a frame based word processor, while MSWord/OO.org are page based word processors. Converting the content between the two is fairly trivial, but converting the formatting is a bitch.

A good analogy is HTML. People convert to and from HTML from within MSWord and think nothing of it. But almost all formatting is lost, as anyone who spends more than two seconds comparing the results can see.

Yes.

[Sheetrock]

There isn't much point in maintaining what (at best) will become two parallel projects trailing Microsoft Office development.

OpenOffice is in the lead as far as the feature set goes, and a lot of effort and energy has to go into a project like this. Optimally both teams should pool their resources and work on OpenOffice, given that it's a true cross-platform solution, and turn KOffice into an OpenOffice integration with KDE.

Re:Yes.

[jonathan_ingram]

Once they switch to using the OpenOffice OASIS format as the default (which is the plan for the next version), then the choice between KOffice, OpenOffice, or StarOffice comes down to which of the respective user interfaces you prefer.

Gentoo Luvin

[GweeDo]

Koffice 1.3 ebuild

be sure to do: emerge koffice-1.3.ebuild digest

Then build build build away!

KOffice for OS X still moving forward

[abischof]

And, don't forget that Ranger Rick is still working on porting KOffice to OS X. There are now binaries available and if you're going to download all the KDE-on-OSX packages, you may as well use the all-packages torrent.

Re:KOffice for OS X still moving forward

[Marvin_Runyon]

Your torrent doesn't work. The tracker refuses connections.

Yes, Until...

[TechnologyX]

...interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.. Until Microsoft nails down their XML patent, then see how fast that KOffice suddenly stops working with MSOffice. :/

KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking

[LibrePensador]

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!

Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking

[tyrione]

Qt applications are only considered "native" because Apple has caved and renamed the Carbon API as native when, in truth, it's a transitional API that is not the direction of OS X.

Qt would become native if it were written with Objective-C/Cocoa integration, built-in, thus allowing a two-way roadway. Wrapping Qt with Objective-C++ would be a step in the right direction, but so far Qt uses only CARBON.

Apple won't use KOffice other than to study it and from there determine how their own Cocoa Tools may benefit from that experience(s), along-side the AppleWorks past.

Apple should focus on making sure it utilizes a document neutral format, thus XML as it has already done extensively and then provide an API in which pre-existing OSS applications can seemless exchange data while retaining how it operates on the data, uniquely to OS X.

Apple is not in the business of making Operating Systems that make Linux the best choice of Operating Systems, but they aren't in the business of using proprietary data format standards thus extending their past history of isolationism.

Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking

[pyros]

Were Apple to do for Koffice what they did for Khtml, and why wouldn't they

As one poster already pointed out earlier, KHTML is LGPL, but KOffice is not. So Apple can't take the core of KOffice and build their own stuff around it without releasing it all under the GPL. With KHTML, they only released the changes to KHTML, but not the stuff built on top of it.

Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking

[tackat]

> KHTML is LGPL, but KOffice is not.

Actually KOffice _is_ LGPL. You probably mixed this up with the rest of KDE which is mostly GPL.

Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking

[pyros]

I was going off what an earlier post had stated. But after your reply I checked the KOffice site, and it says this

Which license applies to KOffice?

KOffice is an open-source project and completely free. All licences are GPL-compatible, mostly GPL or LGPL version 2. Apart exceptions, libraries and filters are mostly LGPL, while applications are mostly GPL.

So Apple probably could write closed-source interfaces around the KOffice guts.

Lightweight ?

[koh]

And what exactly do you call a "lightweight" office suite ?

Any office suite without the clippy thing ? ;)

Re:Lightweight ?

[TechnologyX]

I think they call that a "productive" office suite

Re:Lightweight ?

[koh]

Indeed my friend.

Least productive tools of the '90s :
1) Clippy
2) ClassWizard

Re:Lightweight ?

[Pure Diluted Reality]

3) Bonzi Buddy

pdf read/write support

[esarjeant]

"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.

Re:pdf read/write support

[tuggy]

interesting feature indeed.. looks promising.
i wonder if the OOo guys have considered adding the support for editing pdfs....

Re:pdf read/write support

[Spy Hunter]

Interesting. I just tried this feature, and unfortunately it completely messed up the layout of the two PDFs I tried it on. However, it did successfully import the text and pictures from both documents. It is unlikely that this feature will let you easily edit and re-save a PDF file, but it could be useful for extracting text and images from them.

KWord's MS Word filters have improved, but they still have a ways to go as well. I tried importing my resume, and found that the import filter doesn't support font embedding, so the layout was different, and the table I used was positioned wrong. I probably won't be using KWord as a .doc file viewer, but I am a fan of its light weight and clean interface. If it proves to be stable enough I may use it for a few documents to see how it fares in real usage.

XML Based importing

[mobiux]

Any ideas as to how the open source office apps will be dealing with MS's new patented XML file formats?

filters

[child_of_mercy]

So how good are the word import filters?

I deal with a huge variety of word docs every day and any dev team that asks i can send the ones that barf, but I'm yet to have any of them take up my offer.

Re: my-kingdom-for-a-wordperfect-import-filter

[Florian]

Well, KWord has a WordPerfect import filter.

MS Filters

[Krafty Koder]

"the support for Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 97 documents has become much better." Guys (and girls) in the KOffice team - i'm not interested in those formats. I'm a KOffice fan big time, but I want MS Office 2000 filters at the very least. May I suggest that instead of adding features, the team focuses on filters for the next release. I can't understand why this hasnt been done - especially since OpenOffice can do it. I love the speed of KOffice on KDE - but I'm still stuck with OO as a result of this MS filter issue.

Re:MS Filters

[aldoman]

While I agree with you, I think that Office 97 (not so much 95) support is still useful. A lot of small business's still use it.

If they can be switched to Linux, they will need some way of converting their old documents over to the new KOffice formats.

Re:MS Filters

[codemachine]

Actually, they are much better off adding features and moving towards the OASIS file format based on OpenOffice.org. That way they can just use OO.org's filters instead of having to write their own.

In the mean time, working on better OpenOffice.org import and export opens up the possibility of using those same filters from the command line (the OO.org guys are working on seperating these from the UI). Yes, 2 levels of filters sucks, but it would probably add some degree of support for formats that KOffice doens't currently have filters for. It would also help .sxw and such formats become the standard in the non-MS world.

So that is why the KOffice team is more worried about features and UI design than filters. That, and filters work is not exactly the most fun coding in the world. They actually did quite a bit of work on their filters for this release due to pressure from the user base. I'm sure there would've been many more fun things for them to do, so personally I'd thank them instead of bashing them.

Or you can help them out if you'd like. There are only a handful of developers doing all of the work for KOffice. It is amazing they can do what they do with so little resources.

Re:MS Filters

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I want MS Office 2000 filters at the very least.

I believe that, supposedly, MS Blahblahblah97 and MS Blahblahblah2000 are effectively the same format. I would have sworn that I'd seen "MS Word 97/2000","MS Excel 97/2000" and so forth as options in some menus. (Even MS Office 2000 itself, perhaps?)

Granted that I wouldn't really be surprised if there WERE differences, but I hadn't heard that there were.

Re:MS Filters

[arkhan_jg]

Office 97, 2000 and XP all use the same file format, and can interchange documents seemlessly. Thus Word '97 support is defacto 2000 and XP support also.

The big changes were 95 to 97, and XP to 2003 (XML).

The one exception was Access, which changed it's database structure between 97 and 2000.

Openoffice file format

[debrain]

So when is KOffice going to natively use the OpenOffice.org (OASIS?) file format? ... Google came up a little short on this for me.

Re:Openoffice file format

[inc_x]

It's planned for KOffice 1.4 David Faure is part of the OASIS TC for the OO standard format.

Timing

[TekZen]

KDE had said the KOffice 1.3 would not be a part of the KDE 3.2 release because KOffice would not be ready in time.

Now KOffice 1.3 is released and KDE 3.2 is on the first (and hopefully last) release candidate of the 3.2.0 branch.

-Jackson

Looking for an open Office Suite?

[Mod Me God Too]

Why should I choose KOffice, or OpenOffice. Having a choice is great (and most Linux/XWindows systems will accomodate both) but why should I choose one over the other?

How long until ...

[Dukael_Mikakis]

We get something like KWindows and Microsoft sues? I'm surprised that they haven't gotten in a fit already over their trademarking "Office" (or is the Trademark Microsoft Office).

Hopefully everything will have been streamlined so that the importing and extension compatibility won't be an issue.

Though I may not be entirely proud of it, though, I've done most of my word processing (i.e. Office(TM) work) in Windows in your standard MS software suite, using emacs and vi for scripting and pounding out txt files, but I've been looking for a reason to jump ship to a Linux Office Suite (old KOffice wasn't as streamlined as I'd have wanted, and I've always worried about file compatibility)

The only thing that still concerns me is that it feels like Microsoft could suddenly, spontaneously create a new file format .MSOnly or something and then all the other word processors would be stuck trying to implement support for it (not that it would be so easy to do, or would even happen). What's going to happen if MS does create some new file format? I wouldn't put it past them.

Re:How long until ...

[Tin Foil Hat]

What's going to happen if MS does create some new file format? I wouldn't put it past them.

They are. It's supposed to be an XML format, but whether it will be any easier to parse than the current binary format is anybody's guess. Personally, I'm guessing that it will be, if only because it will have to be in plain text. But hey, what do I know? I could be wrong.

Re:How long until ...

[sydsavage]

I believe that I heard right here on ./ that Bill's idea of an open standard for file formats will be the same old MS-Word binary objects within an XML wrapper. Basically, a neat way to be able to say 'our new file format is 100% XML compatible', while remaining 100% proprietary. Not that this surprises me.

Personally, I think that this should have been the root of the anti-trust settlement. They should have been barred from using proprietary file formats ever again. Either completely open and publish their format, or implement an approved open file format, that is the default format saved to. And have an impartial third party monitor their compliance, barring them from release of the product until their format fully and completely complies with an open standard.

Clueless semi-N00B question...

[Eberlin]

Ok, so I admit it (and continue to do so) -- I run Red Hat 9. Not exactly the KDE-loving distro out there. I feel like I lose out on a lot of the KDE goodness since I don't get a lot of KDE-related apps over RPM (nor APT for RPM).

What method is the easiest, most convenient way to get KDE stuff running on my machine? I always figured compiling from source and solving dependencies would be one of the final options. Not that I haven't done that before...as I try to mangle back some geek cred. I've also heard of an automation process that does the whole source thing but am not sure how well it works)

I'm looking for stuff like K3B, Komba (currently run nautilus:smb but it crawls), the latest KDE itself, Quanta, and maybe I'll try KOffice again (been using OOo 1.0)

I like my KDE but haven't brought myself to procuring downloadable ISOs of KDE-Friendlier distros. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in this predicament.

Re:Clueless semi-N00B question...

[eclectro]

I'm looking for an easy distro for a senior citizen friend. I need to be able to put it on their desk and not worry that will have a hard time.

If it means that it has stupid K menu and stupid looking icons and crap, so be it.

Sometimes the N00Bs need to be reached down to (which represents a significant number of people).

Re:Clueless semi-N00B question...

[codemachine]

KDE has a build system called Konstruct for building KDE packages. You could give that a try if you don't want to use the less than great Red Hat packages.

Also, I'm pretty sure there are third parties that package KDE for Red Hat and Fedora. Since I'm not a user of those distros, I can't really help you there.

Re:Clueless semi-N00B question...

[adrianbaugh]

Probably the easiest way is to back up /home then track down a copy of that debianifier application that was mentioned a few days ago. apt-get install kde/unstable will then be your friend. I suspect it wasn't what you were hoping for though, so:

Have you checked to see if there are Mandrake or PLD rpms available? Those distributions seem pretty prompt with rpm support for KDE, though I doubt you'll find 3.2beta rpms yet, and often the rpms seem droppable into RedHat distributions.
Alternatively you could try their new tool, "Konfigure" or "Kompile" or whatever that apparently automates the build process to a degree (don't think it rpmifies things though..)

Re:Clueless semi-N00B question...

[PReDiToR]

Oh come on, is anyone going to fall for that Troll?

Konqueror is too well known, you shoulda chosen Klip or something to make it credible.

Re:Clueless semi-N00B question...

[Roberto]

Head for kde-redhat.sf.net and enjoy!

don't worry.

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO will sue Microsoft for using their IP.

Koffice

[aurelianito]

I've read "Koffice" and interpretated "coffee". I think I should get some sleep!

Open Office Environment

[Mod Me God]

OO seems to have a foothold in xplatform (critical mass?) support.

But could someone outline the principal benefits of KOffice over OpenOffice or vice versa? In what way are these better than MS office (functionality not price) for an office product implementation?

Having a choice is great, but I'd prefer the best features, and as with all type-2 errors if I don't know what I'm missing, I don't miss it.

Re:Open Office Environment

[Carewolf]

Not that I am an expert, but the most commonly praised feature about KWord, is that it works differently from most wordprocessers; making somethings harder and others easier.

Supposedly it works more like a layout-editor, like those used to print magazines and newspapers.

Re:Open Office Environment

[JabberWokky]

KSpread is fast. Far faster than OOC. It's also smaller. It's a spreadsheet, and there's not much other difference. You can embed KSpread sheets into other KDE apps and view them directly in Konqueror, but you can do that with OO documents as well (there's a kpart plugin for OO.o, although I'm noy 100% certain it's in the main distribution tree or 3rd party).

KWord is fast. WAY faster than OOW. It's also smaller. It is also a completely and totally different type of word processor. OO Writer is more of a MS Word style processor with similar limitations. It is page oriented. KWord is frame oriented, a la Quark and Framemaker. That means it does DTP much more naturally. At the same time it can just give you a repeating frame at the margins and be a pretty typical word processor. Each frame can contain various types of data. The "text" data, aka word processing type stuff, is nicely structured with styles and a style manager. Chapters can be autogenerated, spell check on the fly, and other typical features can be found.

When it comes to a comparison between the two big suites (MS Office, OpenOffice) there are some omissions of features in 1.3 that you might want to be aware of if you do them (stuff like mail merge). Niche office specific tasks. Of course, some of the items like that are missing from OpenOffice as well, and only Word will do. The one that I hear the most complaints about is the lack of a automatic bibliography feature, a la EndNotes. You can, of course, still type them in manually.

KOffice is younger, leaner, and depends on KDElibs for lots of stuff. That means it runs on *nix only... which does include OSX.

--
Evan

Re:Open Office Environment

[eean]

Though I haven't used 1.3, the previous version of KWord and KPresenter weren't really ready for prime time.

The advantages would be tighter intergration with KDE (network transparent files system) and *nix in general. Faster startup times. I'm compiling KOffice right now, I'll have to see if its improved.

Also, a few of the programs in KOffice don't have a counterpart in OpenOffice.

The notion that KOffice is diverting resources from OpenOffice is really pretty bogus though. Theres no reason to think the developers of KOffice would be developing OpenOffice if KOffice didn't exist.

Re:Open Office Environment

[CedgeS]

Word Processor comparison:

Word Processors can be divided into 3 groups. Frame and style based word processors are the easiest to use, and the only acceptable methods for large documents. Some word processors include this architecture. Many fall behind, and are nothing more than a glorified typewriter with spell check and editing.

Frame and style based word processors:

Lotus Amipro (NeXT late 80s, Windows circa 1993):
Originally designed for NeXT, along with Lotus Improv as part of an office suite. This is probably the best word processor ever. It is based on frames and styles, and the user interface is esentially three parts: edit text, layout frames, edit styles. Few menus, a bunch of buttons. Surprisingly simple, easy to use, and powerful (comparable to Adobe FrameMaker). Very small, very fast. Puts everything since it to shame.
Annoyances: None
Missing features: Support for new file formats. Fancy text layouts like text on a path, dropshadows, and outlines.

Adobe FrameMaker
Professional desktop publishing program. As the name implies it is frame based. Along with AmiPro and LaTeX it is capable of really professional quality results.

KWord:
KWord lives on frames and styles. It allows text to flow between arbitrary frames. Very good for working with extremely large documents. The styles are one step removed from the user interface, if they came to the front it would be a professional contender.
Missing features: Macros

Lotus WordPro
The successor to AmiPro. Benefits include support for newer file formats, and some new features. The user interface was changed quite a bit to be more like WordPerfect or Word.
Anoyances: Somewhat sloppy UI design, merges are difficult. HTML output is not perfect.
Missing features: Fancy text layouts like text on a path, dropshadows, and outlines.

LyX / LaTeX:
LaTeX does styles extremely well. Is absolutely excellent for anything where you don't need frames (scientific papers, computer manuals, books, etc). HTML output is the absolute best.
Missing features: Frames essentially don't exist.

Word processors that can do frames and styles, but its difficult:

OpenOffice.org
The guiding design principal here seems to be "be as much like Microsoft Office as possible". In this it succeeds fairly well, with a few slight improvements. Styles and frames are far more accessible, but still hidden away a bit to far for my liking.
Anoyances: User interface is a lot like Microsoft Word

WordPerfect:
Frames and styles exist, but they are hidden out of view.

Word processors that can't do frames and styles:

AbiWord:
Last time I used it it was a glorified WordPad or RTF editor. Very simple to use for small documents. Lack of styles made it unaproachable for anything big.
Anoyances: No styles, no frames
Missing features: almost everything

Microsft Write (the dinky text editor):
Fewer features than Word. Easier to use. Results are just as good, and any other program can open it.
Missing features: spell check, almost everything

Microsoft Word:
This one wins the worst user interface award. It has support for styles and frame bassed document layout, but the user interface is designed towards formatting every gosh darn character / word / paragraph by hand. Most word documents are impossible to work with if they have any size. The user interface is so bad that these features might as well not exist
Anoyances: Almost everything. I've used a lot of word processors, from ancient WordStars and WordPerfects to AmiPro. Word has no guiding concepts to follow, either in document design or understanding the user interface. File format incompatibilities between Word versions make it miserable to deal with. Aweful HTML output.
Missing features: Acceptable user interface, functional file format

Re:Open Office Environment

[eean]

I actually find Word's "Web Page, Filtered" setting to produce fairly clean HTML. As it implies it says it doesn't keep all formating, though in my limited use of it I didn't notice any problems.

Its regular Web Page setting outputs HTML that looks identical to the word file, but only in Internet Explorer.

Re:Open Office Environment

[Angst Badger]

I'd hate to see either OO or KOffice achieve dominance. Indeed, why would anyone see that as desirable? The goal is to have a common file format, not applications monoculture. We already have that with Microsoft.

The whole office suite idea is flawed and only serves to line the pockets of commercial office suite producers and to create a winner-takes-all (and user-gets-screwed) environment. If it suits my particular preferences and needs, I ought to be able to run the word processor from KOffice, the spreadsheet from OpenOffice, and some commercial charting program and have them all interoperate.

If we have interoperability based on open standards, then software competes on its merits. (With the understanding, often lost here on Slashdot, that the merits of software are a matter of individual needs and opinions.) Without open interoperability, we have vendor lock-in and monopolies.

Re:Open Office Environment

[adrianbaugh]

And really, if you're writing a document complicated enough to require an automatic bibliography your time would far better be spent learning LaTeX or hunting down KLyX than trying to do the job with a conventional wordpro. The right tool for the job..

Re:Open Office Environment

[starseeker]

KOffice:

Uses KDE environment to full potential, very smooth, fast and clean. Less features than the others last time I looked. Doesn't really handle MS Office docs well yet, again last time I looked.

OpenOffice

Multiplatform, full of features, loads Microsoft Office documents quite well. Downside is it is rather large and slow. Occasional quirk, but on the whole rock steady.

MS Office

Feature wise, MS Office still rules the roost. But the price there is closed document formats, an untrustworthy company holding the reigns, and no Linux version. I'd count those as downsides.

Re:Open Office Environment

[JabberWokky]

I agree... I'd like a tool like KWord, however, to load the final product for press layout and preview. An interactive GUI to view the intermediate step of the source document to a print format (like PDF). Or to combine several complicated articles... think a magazine publishing papers. LaTeX to write them, and then a DTP app to lay them out alongside advertisements. Right where Quark and Framemaker fits right now.

I use Kate/vi for most of my content. Right now I'm putting together a small press book in KWord, almost as a test run (since there's no deadline on it, and it is a fairly complicated work with many fonts and graphics). It tells the story via press releases and official documents, so it's a pretty ornate work and precisely where DTP features come in handy rather than word processing or raw text input.

I'll admit that I'm half doing it to test the limits of KWord (and to test the binder because I can specify different types of paper for various pages).

--
Evan

Re:Open Office Environment

[diersing]

In defense, that really wasn't a serious suggestion. More of food for thought that in the desktop market (where office suites would seem to be), that Linux (or OSS) would need to have a single face to compete with MS. Professional women's basketball is a hard sell, when its presented in 2 or 3 different leagues and you split the core supporters, none of them will gain enough support to be feasible. Not that OSS is girls' B-Ball, just saying that when you want to make a dent in a market that has MS with 97% domination, maybe having splintered office suites isn't the path of success.

Don't get me wrong, without RedHat and Mandrake to compare against I wouldn't have fallen in love with SuSE, but as techies we're going to try things and tinker no matter what.

Re:Open Office Environment

[swv3752]

Lyx is better supported than Klyx. And it does work on pretty much everything though it requires cygwin and an x server to run on MSWin.

Re:Open Office Environment

[eean]

I think that is the valid agrument in the context of a mainstream distro carefully selecting what packages to put in (or what the defaults are at least.) Koffice is still fairly immature as a whole. I've been getting crashs in 1.3 as I've played around with it.

However, Kivio looks better then Dia and while I don't find Karbon to be as easy to use as Flash, it's shaping up.

Re:Open Office Environment

[I_M_Noman]

Lotus Amipro (NeXT late 80s, Windows circa 1993): Originally designed for NeXT, along with Lotus Improv as part of an office suite

If memory serves me right, Lotus bought Ami from Samna in late '91 and distributed it with 1-2-3 rel. 3.5 for DOS.

Re:Open Office Environment

[Ragica]

Ami Pro. Yes. Amen.

Re:Open Office Environment

[farnz]

Or indeed Kile for KDE. Much more up to date than KLyX, and quite effective.

My opinion

[W32.Klez.A]

This is great. Every advancement of Open Source technologies makes me eager for the day that we see Microsoft as just another competitor, rather than a huge beast crushing everything in its path.

I haven't tried it yet, but as far as how things have been going in the Open Source communities, I'm pretty sure I won't be disappointed.

Off Topic: what is wrong with the server?

[Espectr0]

I have been given 5 points, i used them, then i got them again, sometimes the post count is 0, and as you can see i am replying in a post i already moderated

Re:Off Topic: what is wrong with the server?

[Gossy]

Good point. Despite 115 comments at -1, this is still showing as zero on the front page to me. Front page just got updated too. Odd.

Will this work on OS X?

[FireBreathingDog]

I know I should RTFA, but I am a lazy OS X user (this is a true statement--not flamebait--comprised of two separate but not mutually exlusive facts: I am a Mac OS X user and I am lazy), so my question is:

Can I get KOffice to run on OS X? What do I need to use? Apple's X11 plus KDE?

Thanks in advance to anyone who wishes to do my own work and research for me.

Re:Will this work on OS X?

[Darth_Foo]

There's gotta be a way to do it; maybe using fink. That's how I got Knode to run on my iBook with the Apple X11 server.

Re:Will this work on OS X?

[cozziewozzie]

Several people have posted about this already. It's possible, but not yet a walk in the park. Head over to dot.kde.org for some useful links.

Koffice?

[Kohath]

Some koffice drops will clear that right up.

Open Office Environment

[Mod Me God]

OO seems to have a foothold in xplatform (critical mass?) support, now a KOffice resurgence.

But could someone outline the principal benefits of KOffice over OpenOffice or vice versa? In what way are these better than MS Office (functionality not price) for an office product implementation?

Having a choice is great, but I'd prefer the best features, and as with all type-2 errors if I don't know what I'm missing, I don't miss it.

Mandrake Binaries

[jonbryce]

Presumably we won't see these anytime soon, unless someone is kind enough to volunteer?

Re:/. JUST GOT SCREWED

[stoolpigeon]

I would answer your question but every time I try to read it I just get an error message. That is when I can see any replies on the thread at all. sorry.

at least until

[IndigoSkies]

MS puts patent restrictions on their XML interface so nobody can legally support it.

Re:at least until

[roundand]

Too late - here's the the official Microsoft site on their Office XML Schema patents.

OOo filters?!

[Chordonblue]

Really? Wowsers! When did they do that - is that new to 1.3? Of course, it's not like trying to interoperate with a blinded format like .DOC.

I wonder if the .DOC deconstruction at OOo has in any way assisted other office competitors like KDE in providing filters.

Native MS Word support?

[e0nblue]

This is nice, but does KOffice support saving in MS Word Documents as well as OOo does?

how's the stability?

[timothy]

I feel burned by KOffice, because it's crashed a lot for me over the past few years. I like that it's frame-based, and it really seems nice ... until it crashed for the Xth time.

OpenOffice has not crashed in my (occasional but sometimes extended) use, which may be blind luck, peculiarity of my personal magnetic field, etc ... but whyever :)

I like that KOffice is there, and I appreciate that it's a different project and that many people like KOffice -- I just don't like crashing :)

timothy

Re:how's the stability?

[fault0]

Yeah, I personally think that koffice 1.2 and before should have been pre-1.0. Koffice 1.3 is a lot more stable however.. it's been delayed for a LONG time now, for good reasons: mostly stability problems have been fixed.

Interesting, but...

[plj]

..when we will also get full Mac OS X (using native QT libraries - without X11) support?

Yes, I know it compiles and runs. But I mean: Production-quality version. Binary packages would be nice, too.

Any new information about this?

Try both.

[Balinares]

I think their plan is to use OpenOffice as a stopgap, while keeping the work on KOffice. If you want to know, I used to believe that they were being stupid and should throw their technological knowledge at OO, like everybody else... But after actually giving the latest KOffice a try (I like to try stuff for myself, just to know what I'm talking about), I changed my mind.

I've basically switched to KOffice for my daily use, in fact. It is -NOT- yet as featureful as OO. However, it is so fast, lightweight and efficient (I'm in love with it's layout model) that I'm finding it a somewhat better tool for most of my daily tasks.

I'm not sure they'll ever be able to really compete with such a large, commercially-backed (by Sun) app as OpenOffice, but I must admit I now find myself darn glad they're trying. It'd be quite unlikely, but I wouldn't put it above them to pull a Konqueror in that market as well. You never know.

In the meanwhile, it's damn nice to have a KOffice to show to non-geek people -- especially those who won't switch to OO because of its massive weight and slowness. And if they don't manage it, well at least one can hope the competition will prod OO into getting lighter and faster...

Re:Try both.

[teslatug]

One important thing that OOo has and that KOffice will probably never have is the chance to use essentially the same app across different platforms (Win32, Linux, SunOS, etc). It's sort of like Konqueror vs. Mozilla.

Re:Try both.

[mandolin]

With the exception of win32 (assuming you don't count kde-cygwin), I could easily see KOffice eventually running everywhere. .. Including Mac OS X, given the recent efforts to get KDE in general up and running on that platform.

I agree that the OpenOffice developers seem to have cross-platform support much more in hand at this point. I'm assuming that's because there's more ooo developers to spare.

Re:Try both.

[cozziewozzie]

KOffice runs natively on OSX (without the X server), so that's not a problem.

On the other hand, to run it on Windows, you do need an X server. I've read recently on a Qt-KDE compatibility layer which translates KDE apps to pure Qt apps, and people are using it to port KDE applications to Windows. Maybe something like this will happen for KOffice too?

Market thyself

[n1k0]

Hi perbert,

Why do we give a sh!t about KOffice 1.3 given what you've stated in this article? There are no summaries of important changes, bug fixes, or new features - in short, no reasons to entice people to try it. Anyone in a position to use KOffice has probably heard of it by now, yet the body of the article is a gentle 'hello' to KOffice. You are reaching an audience of millions by posting to this site. If you care about KOffice, the least you could do is hype it a bit. This article should be deferred to Freshmeat.

Nothing personal - the number of useless and duplicate posts running here is really starting to irk me, and I'm sure you only want to help KOffice.

-Nick

Re:KOffice lightweight?

[bluGill]

Compare it to openOffice.org. Okay, specificly I compared OpenOffice1.1 Writer with kWord 1.2.1. kWord is faster to load, and on the short 1 or 2 page documents I normally deal with (my resume) seems faster.

Re:wasted effort?

[bluGill]

Read Fred Brooks classic The Mythical Man-Month.

It takes 9 months to make a baby no matter how many women you assign to the task.

kOffice and OpenOffice.org are intentionally designed differently. In the long run which will work out better is hard to say. They are different, and you can't just grab parts of one design and slap it on the other without creating a mess worse than everyone going about doing their own thing.

Re:The article

[iminplaya]

My bad. The page was showing 0 comments(wasn't loading apparently) for a long time.

There's Keynote too

[mezis]

Sorry for the Apple proselytism, but you're wrong -- Keynote has more than decent PowerPoint import/export support. It is commercial, though.

Here's why, from what I read.

[Balinares]

Found the information a while back on dot.kde.org (can't find the link though, sorry).

The thing is that OO's input filters apparently load files directly into its memory structures, without an intermediate API. This makes it highly difficult for other projects to use them directly. So the best they can do is peek and poke at OO's code, try to understand what it does and why, and then use it in their own filter -- which they actually export as a library (libwv2) so that other projects can make use of it.

I -WISH- OO would have been more modular though. Would have saved loads of time...

Re:Here's why, from what I read.

[cozziewozzie]

Bingo. That's the reason that the KOffice people have stated repeatedly on their mailing lists.

To add to that, though, libwv2 is being used by KWord and Abiword and developed jointly, which is another great example of Open Source cooperation.

only need one

[farquharsoncraig]

Let's see here, Knuth delivered his historical TeX speech at the AMS somewhereabouts in the early 1980's and nothing has really come close to supplanting his brain progeny since then. It runs in ${your favorite text editor} and ${your favorite shell}, can be invoked from a script to perform arbitrarily complex formatting or some other action, is extensible, portable, and utterly simple and easy to learn.

HTML like languages of necessity are alike powerful and simple in the style of TeX based systems, but use quite gregarious markup, and as for spreadsheets, use ROOT, PAW, or vanilla LAPACK.

Re:only need one

[Stween]

Indeed, LaTeX rocks.

I never used it before my 3rd year at uni, where they introduced it as part of a UNIX crash course. The lecturer pointed out very carefully that if we were searching the web for help, we had to search for TeX, or something more specific like bibtex, because once a few years ago a student or two were pulled up for looking up dodgy materials, though they were actually just looking for help with TeX.

I did notice though that when I tried latex on Google, it returned links relevant to TeX, not anything of lower standards :)

Re:only need one

[Brandybuck]

Despite the obvious benefits to TeX, it will never be adopted by mainstream document producers for equally obvious reasons. WYSIWYG is more important than extreme flexibility and raw power. Whether this is a good or bad thing is for the philosophers to debate until the end of time.

Re:only need one

[aastanna]

I find I rarely need WYSIWYG, once I settle on a format for my documents it's just a matter of writing the text and slapping in the graphics, then trying to make the document conform to that format. With LaTeX the last step is not needed, although setting up the style properly to begin with can be a pain.

For school or anything that's just going to be used by me, LaTeX is the way to go. The only reason I give in at work and use Word is when I send out documentation and someone needs to make a change the sure don't want to go into LaTeX source and recompile a PDF...and LaTeX doesn't have version tracking.....now if I could only convince people to use CVS for all documents...hmmmm....well, that and being a microsoft shop with no one else having MiKTeX installed...

Good conversion filters?

[Mr. Underbridge]

The MS Word import filters are alone worth the price of admission

I would love to see what word documents you're using that don't get completely trashed by OO's conversion from Word. Every version (yes, including 1.1) I try it again, only to find that it can't handle much in the way of embedded stuff - granted, it's getting better, but not nearly close enough. And the word processor is the best of the bunch, the powerpoint clone isn't even remotely ready for prime time.

I suppose my point is I would like to see more cooperation between different factions working on office suites, and less wheel-reinvention, until they get to the point where they're really good.

Re:Good conversion filters?

[dont_think_twice]

I used to feel the same way, but I was absolutely amazed when I upgraded to 1.1. Just for fun, I tried opening a complex Word document. Everything was absolutely perfect. Every equation came out exactly right, the pictures were all correct, the formatting was right, even the images drawn in Word with multiple layers were right.

I am not suprised that they are still getting some things wrong (as you claim), since it is such a complicated thing to do well, but after seeing how amazing 1.1 was, I have no doubt that I will eventually be able to actually use OO interchangably with Word.

Re:Good conversion filters?

[Mr. Underbridge]

I am not suprised that they are still getting some things wrong (as you claim), since it is such a complicated thing to do well, but after seeing how amazing 1.1 was, I have no doubt that I will eventually be able to actually use OO interchangably with Word.

Yeah, I don't want to sound ungrateful to the OO guys, but it's not there - now - for me. I just installed the development version (680), and I might throw some bugs their way.

Interestingly enough, the version of OO I have on windows does do a much better job opening MS than my Linux box does. Same version too. So I imagine it may take some configuring.

Re:Good conversion filters?

[cozziewozzie]

I prefer OO's Impress to Powerpoint. Surely, it doesn't have as many gimmicks, but when I sat in front of it, I was capable of putting out a decent presentation in quite a short time. With Powerpoint, it's always been a struggle for me.

So, which one should I use?

[Realistic_Dragon]

The answer is both, duh.

The best advantage of OSS software is that you can afford to run all of them. Who could afford to have MS Office and $COMPETITOR at $450 each? On the other hand OOo, KO and GnomeOffice have just cost me a little time and some donations that were my choice to make.

(IMO the best mix is AbiWord for editing, OO.o for conversion, Sodipodi for graphics... but hell, pick whatever you like.)

and it sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak to the version of Kword that was released today. But after I read your comment I went and fired up the previous version under Mepis, and loaded in a WP 10 file I've been writing. About one in twenty words lacked a space before the next word. And all curly quotes and apostrophes got transferred over as squares.

Still, I'm eager to see if the new version has a better import filter. You'd have to be a masochist to use the previous version of Kword to import a lenthy WP file.

Re:I really enjoy KDE thanks for the great job peo

[hexix]

Just to throw my 2 bits in:

I would agree that KDE is much more mature when it comes to functionality. Stuff generally just works in KDE, such as the KIO Slaves (I think that's what they're called) which let you access remote networks or devices just as you would your local filesystem. Gnome has this with their gnome-vfs but it seems really buggy, at least their ssh/sftp ones are.

But as for ease of use, I'd have to say Gnome kicks KDE's butt. KDE is a mess of program menus, buttons, and don't even get me started about the kde control center.

Just look at Konqueror's toolbar. I just find it overwhelming.

Some may find GNOME's policies of simplifying their interfaces to be overkill but I personally think it's paying off. Many would agree that MacOS X has a great interface, and I think part of the reason is this same general philosophy.

So, I choose to use GNOME for this reason. If KDE was to do a massive UI cleanup I'd probably switch because their framework seems to be much more sound. But GNOME is catching up quick, and has a very nice interface as well.

Recursive!

[PReDiToR]

Recursiveness is at the bottom of all good *nix names, see GNU for the old and WINE for the new.

Re:MS Office Compatibility

[PReDiToR]

Everyone knows that when the next version of MS Office comes out it will likely break even the latest versions of KOffice and OO

So when it comes out, tell your friends not to bother upgrading to it. You could even suggest they try OOo first, then if they don't like it, stick with what they have.

If they ask why, just tell them the activation in the latest MSOffice hasn't been cracked yet (ha ha).

Obligatory Simpsons Quote...

[labratuk]

Dear Mr. President. There are too many states nowadays. Please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot!

-- Grampa Simpson writes another letter, ``The Front''

Re:Code base

[fault0]

> I was wondering: Is KOffice based off the Star Office code like Open Office, or is it new development?

Nope.. koffice predates the open-sourcing of StarOffice by a few years. However, historically, it hasn't been ready for primetime because of lack of developers and consistant rewrites (the core of kword being rewritten all the time, krita being rewritten 3 times over the last 4 years), certain apps gets dumped in favor of even more rewrites (killustrator versus karbon14,etc..)

> And is there significant difference in functionality, or is it mostly UI differences?

OpenOffice has a significantly greater mass of features, but koffice is lightweight. Until recently, I perferred using koffice more, but I actually used OpenOffice more. That's starting to change now though, koffice 1.3 is pretty nice.

Still no Kexi

[nurb432]

With out a 'user friendly' database module its still handicapped..

Regardless of what 'techies' believe, a OSS replacement for MSAccess is still relevant, for the 'average user'.

The good thing about Koffice

[kitzilla]

The good thing about Koffice is its speed and simplicity. Click -- bang -- it's open. Typetypetype. Job is done. It's almost as simple as a notepad-type program, but comes with a reasonably complete feature set. Great for 90% of my writing.

Now that it supposedly handles Star Office's XML format, I'll be more likely to use it. My only reservation before was that documents containing images or tables really needed to be saved in Kword's native format. Since I think of Open Office as my main suite, I was hesitant to create documents in Kword I might need to edit later.

I'm glad the Kword developers have stayed at it. Their product is attractive, stable, and easy to use. I'll be happy to see a mature port to my other platform, OS X.

Re:What about KDE 3.1.5?

[jonathan_ingram]

3.1.5 is just a minor update to 3.1 to fix a security issue. The big news is the imminent release of 3.2, which has many more changes and improvements over 3.1.x than you'd expect for a mere .1 version number change. Most significant to me (I'm currently running the Release Candidate) is that it's *much* more responsive than 3.1.x on the same hardware. This release will be a big poke in the eye to all the idiots who claim that KDE gets more bloated with each release.

OS X with the database

[zpok]

I am really cheering on the port to OS X, and I really really hope it'll include the database.

You have No Idea how popular this could become.

Please, include a simple mySQL installer and setup wizzard (or better yet, integrate that in the KOffice installer).

If they succeed, they deserve the world (and maybe a chunk or two of Mars).

Absolutely

[Alcemenes]

While I haven't used KDE or KOffice in over a year I agree with this statement. I have created database applications for clients using Access and having a friendly front-end for MySQL similar to that of MS Access would be a huge plus. PHP and web interfaces can only go so far.

Also this is a joke, there's a poit...

[SlashDotAgent]

Everybody bashed Microsoft for it's integration of Win/IE/MSO, but when KDE does it - it's ok. This is to say that since if KDE decided to do a similar integration, then there must be a reason, and Microsoft's programmers probably had a similar reason. So the blame on Microsoft should *not* be about the actual integration, but rather for disallowing others to make their own integration!

LaTeX

[Jacek Poplawski]

LaTeX is the way to create text documents. I made my master thesis in LaTeX, I never needed to use Microsoft Office.

Money should be invested in projects like LyX, to join LaTeX power with friendly UI.

Why everyone want so much to "emulate" Windows environment, when there are so great alternatives? Why copy, and not create something new?

And you guys are supposed to be geeks.....

[MarkKnopfler]

I know I might sound a bit crabby ( I am getting old) but what the hell ? We have had latex/xfig for ages on unix/linux/*BSD now. It produces the prettiest documents without all that horrible GUI. We might be screaming ourselves hoarse about how computer literate/savvy and what not we are but when it comes to actually using unix based tools, we go pffft...

Honestly, Koffice is a bad tool. About 2 years ago. The last time I used it, it would crash with the every second thing I typed in. After that I pretty much dont use it. In fact I pretty much dont install it. The problem is that we are ( although a large number of people who think they use unix will scream ) trying very hard to make unix-windows. I used to think that people at /. would not be pretty much interested in Koffice -- there is latex and if you want wysiwig, you have lyx. Well but sadly, the so called unix geeks run unix because it gives them a feel good geek feeling.. that is all. They do not use unix because of the advantages of unix, they use unix because it is so cool...

Has anybody ACTUALLY tried documentation on unix before they go ooh and aah about OO and Koffice ? I really dont think so. If we actually are the developer/IT/unix community that we so vociferously say that we are, and were actually using unix in our day to day work, we would not have been using Koffice. I think a large number of people on this forum use unix as a web browser -- that is all.

The latex/xfig combination has been serving me perfectly for some time now. Apart from using them for normal day to day activities, I use them for development documentation also. It produces extremely high quality documents and of the things I like about it is that I can version my documents effectively in CVS. It can also be used to make presentations. That leaves the spreadsheet stuff... go and use anything.. OO ( is my choice )

But please please please, you new-unix-kids-on-the-block try and pick up some unix first before going linux-is-oh-so-cool....

Apologies
MarkKnopfler

FONTS FONTS FONTS

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

Interestingly enough, the version of OO I have on windows does do a much better job opening MS than my Linux box does. Same version too. So I imagine it may take some configuring.

Many people do not install the MS Fonts from Office on their Linux machines and then wonder why their documents look different....

If you install the MS fonts in Linux, OOo will work as good for 95 % of all text documents as any version of MSO.

Not just fonts

[Mr. Underbridge]

Many people do not install the MS Fonts from Office on their Linux machines and then wonder why their documents look different....

Well, that's obvious, and I accept those issues. I was more referring to linespacing issues (and yes, I accounted for the different font spacings). Dunno what's with that.

As you say, once I get around to installing MS fonts on linux (not a fun process), I expect things will improve.

As an aside, do you know of any distros that give better native support for that process? I realize they can't actually *include* the fonts (patent/copyright encumbered), but making it more "drag and drop" would be nice.

talking with your mouth full

[Doc Ruby]

MMGT, you can't even use a single webbrowser to make sense in a single post, let alone use two office suites simultaneously. Nor is your dim carping relevant to most people who pick one tool for its utility, then learn to use it as best they can. While you apparently are so dazzled by the array of tools that you never learn to use even one well at all.