KOffice 1.4 Released

An anonymous reader writes "The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KOffice 1.4 for Linux and Unix operating systems. This release is a large step towards embracing the OASIS OpenDocument file format which has become an approved standard for office file formats. This format is also used by the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0, thus providing high interoperability. New applications in the 1.4 release: Krita - a pixel based image manipulation application (screenshots, movie) and Kexi - an integrated data management application (screenshots)."

Comments

MS Office

[Beuno]

Yay!
Now we only have to wait til 2020 for MS to release MS Office with support for Oasis, que it's compatibility all around us!

Re:MS Office

[Szaman2]

Are you kidding - 2020 is a very optimistic date! First they have to release Longorn and that's scheduled for like the end of this century...

Re:MS Office

[JabberWokky]

Interestingly, KOffice was hampered a bit by the fact that Oasis doesn't address some of the file types that KOffice uses. When possible, they used them, but until OO.o 2.0 is out, there's no final standard, and even then there will be no standard for some file formats. Hopefully the OASIS format specs will distance themselves a bit from OO.o in order to provide useful specifications for a wider set of applications than ones that line up against OO.o.

--
Evan

Re:MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

why the fuck would they bother? the oasis spec is not able to support of all the features found in .DOC already....

Re:MS Office

[isny]

Oasis in MS office could have been done a lot sooner, but the Gallagher brothers kept fighting.

Re:MS Office

[arendjr]

..., but until OO.o 2.0 is out, there's no final standard...

You mean like this?

Re:MS Office

[JabberWokky]

Aye, but that was released after I posted my message. ;) From what I had read, there had to be two implementations to progress to approved standard. Mea culpa.

KOffice can do things (and has entire apps) that OO.o does not. OO.o (especially 2.0) can do things that KOffice can't. Syncing those capabilities is key, and will occur when there is more than one released suite supporting OASIS (right now KOffice is the only one by simple luck of having the release coincide with the standard).

OASIS is a standard, but only one office suite uses it. Open Office 2.0 will (unless somebody else sneaks in before them) be the second. Then the fun begins.

--
Evan

Re:MS Office

[JabberWokky]

And as a further mistake, I misread that link as being dated 6-23-05. It is 1:06am in my time zone. I am going to bed before I start being completely incorrect. Is there another suite out there that uses OASIS? Did OO.o release 2.0 last week and I missed it? Heh. G'night.

--
Evan

Re:MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

... que it's compatibility all around us!

Que? "It is compatibility"?

Did you perhaps mean "Cue its compatibility, all around us!"? Not that such a sentence makes much sense anyway, of course.

--
Grammar Nazi
Attempting to educate Slashdot, one frickin' user at a time.

Re:MS Office

[jallen02]

I am always curios what happens when you want to implement some feature that is not represented by the Oasis document spec? Your just out of luck? Ammend the spec? I hope they have provisions for dealing with that sort of thing.

Jeremy

Re:MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

why the fuck would they bother? no-one using .doc gives a rat's about standards anyway.

What's the point?

[glrotate]

All of the momentum and best coders are behind OpenOffice. Does the market really need a KO?

Re:What's the point?

[Rob_Ogilvie]

Yes. OpenOffice makes KOffice feel lightweight.

Re:What's the point?

[ProfaneBaby]

MS Office is the one piece of software where MS really excels (I'd put Visual Studio a close second, and Exchange a distant third). If the Free Software folks want to challenge MS on that playing field, they're going to NEED to get behind a single product.

Re:What's the point?

[halltk1983]

How about just a single standard format?
Or what about a standard desktop?
It's diversity that makes linux great. Not that it's free, but that if you don't like something you can change it. You can even publish the change so others who didn't like the difference can use your work and not reinvent the wheel. By giving people choices: KDE/Gnome, Vi/EMacs, Koffice/OOo; you are in fact ensuring that a larger base leaves Microsoft, because you have something that more people like. Not everyone likes everything about one thing, but people change things so people can change it.

Re:What's the point?

[DogDude]

I ask this question about 99% of OSS products. This is no different. It's another case of a solution looking for a problem. That's a *guaranteed* formula for failure in the mass market. Sure, there will be hobbyists that use this stuff forever, but most people will just look at it and think to themselves, "Uh, what's the point?"

Re:What's the point?

[bhalo05]

Since when is competition bad, especially now that Oasis promises document compatibility?

Besides, KOffice is actually lighter and well integrated within KDE.

Moreover, I'm pretty sure is easier to contribute to Koffice than OpenOffice. From what I could gather, OpenOffice code is vast and really complicated. Heck, I hope at least now the code is not commented in German!

Re:What's the point?

[dabigpaybackski]

KOffice is lightweight, but perhaps a lightweight office suite is good enough for most people. Another way to consider the relationship between the two suites is to say that KOffice helps keep OOo lean.

Re:What's the point?

[Just Some Guy]

But OpenOffice is painful for me to use in an otherwise KDE-only desktop. For starters, it doesn't use KIO slaves, so I can't open files fish sftp:// fish://, or webdav:// from remote hosts. That and a million other small things (like load time) make KWord much more pleasant for me in daily usage.

I'm glad we have two strong, popular office suites that don't compete for resources -- that is, KDE folks probably have little interest in hacking OpenOffice and vice versa. Now that they'll be sharing a common file format, it'll be nice to be able to pick the right tool for a particular job and know that users can still view the results in their environment of choice.

Re:What's the point?

[JabberWokky]

You just described the starting point for just about every company, book, product and project ever created. Actually, everything that is created other than the initial invention.

If somebody didn't look at it and say "I can make something slightly better", we'd be reading Slashdot on clay tablets.

--
Evan

Re:What's the point?

[misleb]

Have you even USED OpenOffice on Linux? It is so bloated and slow with its proprietary widget set and all. An Office suite that is integrated with a Linux desktop is much needed.

-matthew

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad we have two strong, popular office suites that don't compete for resources

Yup, so popular that the two of them combined wouldn't add up to 1% of the Office suite market...

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

OOO now can use native widgets.
Try the 1.9m* snapshots. Feels a LOT snappier.

Re:What's the point?

[0racle]

I say the same thing about Linux, "Uh, what's the point?" I mean theres *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OS X, hell, theres a real Unix for every platform so why do all these people waste their time on this linux thing. Its just a solution looking for a problem. 'That's a *guaranteed* formula for failure in the mass market. Sure, there will be hobbyists that use this stuff forever, but most people will just look at it and think to themselves, "Uh, what's the point?"'

Re:What's the point?

[NotFamous]

...Windows CTE (Clay Tablet Edition) with anti-aliased cuneiform fonts...
...No need to reboot, just drop it...

Resume normal transmission...

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should use GNOME... that's where all the OpenOffice integration work is being done.

Re:What's the point?

[misleb]

Modern markets are filled with products that started out as solutions looking for problems. Successful marketing has a funny way of creating "problems." The issue here is that OSS, by its very nature, has little capacity for marketing beyond following current fads. BUt if the current anti-MS fad continues, OSS can do very well.

-matthew

Re:What's the point?

[toddjames]

This is the same diversity that is holding desktop linux back, however.

Re:What's the point?

[BRonsk]

I think you are mixing everything here. Diversity makes linux marginal. Because My grandma will not be able to help my aunt fix her computer, because she uses a different shell, a different WM, a different flavor of the same thing. What you dislike in Windows ("The same interface and settings for everyone") is what makes it popular. Because most of the people don't care to take time/energy into configuring the damn thing. You do because it's your hobby.

For people (ie: The Mass Market) what is needed is something that will get to the point: editing images, recording a video, etc...

Linux's configurability (as well as UNIX's in general) is what prevent it from getting to the mass market. People and distros are working toward a simpler Linux, but we're far from it yet, and there's so many of them!

People need to be able to interoperate simply. Between two flavors of Linux, it might just be impossible for a non-techy, which makes the entire Linux base highly fragmented. I am pretty sure that I can administer any flavor of Windows out there (from '95 to XP) without great difficulty, because it is so STANDARDIZED. And that's exactly what Linux is missing. User Interface Standard (note as I didn't add an S to standard)

As far as OASIS is concerned, it might be the holy grail of nerds, that might make it no less useless. Until the main Office suite supports it, it will remain marginal. Proof is the de-facto standard is MS's format, and rightly so since they just dominate the market.

Don't get me wrong, I hope this will change. I just don't see OASIS having any part in it. Nerds are too focused on technical perfection and not enough on marketting. People don't give a sh**t about how it works most of the time.

Save it as Word 2k. It will work everywhere.

Re:What's the point?

[halltk1983]

Ahh... but here's the thing. Under it all is the command line. That is universal, my friend... or at least more universal than most things I've found working at a repair shop...
If you want great uniformity, even more so than windows, go to OSX. Same menu is for everything. No need to customize... no need for grandpa to do the tech support either. Granted, that doesn't help linux, but I'm sure that eventually one or two of the distro's will become the defacto standard, as will one or two WM... but the cool thing is that you get to choose which one you want, or if you want you can go with neither. Go straight CLI. A friend has a server up on a Pentium 75MHz... try that on ANY windows.

Re:What's the point?

[Kafka_Canada]

Maybe the momentum, i.e. hype, but the best coders? Good God, man, not judging by the output. OOo is a bloated piece of crap that's basically unusable. Gnome office is lightweight, fast, fully functional, pretty, and in practically every way superior to OOo (and in a number of ways superior to MS Office). I can't speak for KOffice, but I suspect it's fairly similar to Gnome office.

Anyway, stop drinking the Kool-Aid, think for yourself, and it should be instantly obvious that there's very good reason for developers and users to get involved with KOffice or other OS office software.

Re:What's the point?

[N3Roaster]

I once helped upgrade a school computer lab from Apple //e machines to a network of donated Windows machines (this was well before it was even close to reasonable to put Linux in an elementary school). The clients were all 386 based machines running Windows for Workgroups and the server/router to the Internet was a 486 box running NT 4.something. It was slow, but it did what it had to do and it did it well. So, while it might not survive a slashdotting, you certainly can run a Windows server on even worse than a 75MHz Pentium.

Re:What's the point?

[ninja_assault_kitten]

If OpenOffice has the best coders and this is the best they can come up with, I'm a little worried.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using KDE for a while. It needs a little tweaking to look nice, though (especially on Fedora, it's easier to rebuild it from source than deal with that bastardized verion of it). Whenever I'm stuck using Windows or GNOME, both feel so primitive in comparison. The IOSlaves are so nice to work with. I can set up Webdav on my server and use Kate to edit it directly off of that. I can do the same with any KDE application. The network integration is simply amazing.

Re:What's the point?

[JabberWokky]

So it's marginal. That doesn't keep me from using it. Not many people drive Ferrari sports cars either... yet you don't hear many people complaining that Ferrari is being prevented from getting to the mass market.

For just about every product there are a wide variety of goods, most of which do not appeal to the buyers of their choice. People who shop for the cheapest processed food cheese slices seldom also shop for aged bleu cheese. And yet both seem to do fine, and most grocers carry both. Is it shocking that there might be people who like Windows and people who like Linux and that they can (*gasp*) coexist? Or even people who like OSX, people who like BSD, people who like Solaris? Some brands will appear and disappear, just like certain brands of cheeses. Others will appear and be too niche for big grocery stores... you'll have to order them from gourmet places.

But you seldom find people who like bleu cheese ranting that bleu cheese should be more like Kraft cheese slices because that "is what prevent[s] it from getting to the mass market". I don't think bleu cheese will ever have the market share of Kraft cheese slices. And I'm okay with that.

--
Evan

Re:What's the point?

[halltk1983]

CAN, or COULD... very important difference. How difficult would it be to find a copy of NT, and how much would it cost? I know, I know, google links, etc. will ensue, but really: is it worth the trouble, will it be secure, and is it easy to manage?
I recognize my mistake... you can run one...
/s/do that/do that well/

Re:What's the point?

[tyrione]

Who are you fooling. Your grandmother couldn't help your aunt fix Windows, let alone DOS or any other Operating System for that matter.

That's what grandchildren are for--to lend a hand to their elders.

Re:What's the point?

[marcello_dl]

Cool, that would be the first rock stable thing seen on Windows.

Re:What's the point?

[Brandybuck]

All of the momentum and best coders are behind Microsoft. Does the market really need another operating system?

Re:What's the point?

[Zork the Almighty]

All of the momentum and best coders are behind OpenOffice. Does the market really need a KO?

You could have made the same argument against KHTML. I think the KDE project has shown that there is plenty of room for slick, lightweight alternatives. Your post is really more of a troll than anything. How is it that KOffice adds two new apps and tons of features when "OpenOffice has all the momentum" ? And *best* coders ? Really, who are you to judge ? OpenOffice is the undoubtedly the bigger project. Does that mean that it is automatically better and that there is no room for alternatives ? Really, with that type of thinking you should just be using Windows and Office.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have... I try each new release of KDE. None of them have been particularly impressive. Poorly thought-out (particularly the artwork, menus and general arrangement of optiosn and features), slow and *very* buggy -- and this was Mandriva. Kubuntu and Gentoo versions. I kept hearing about KIOSlaves... and yet, they didn't actually do anything that GNOME-VFS didn't. Odd, that. Each KDE version has always turned out to be 90% Slashdot hype.

Re:What's the point?

[yokem_55]

This should be clarified: OOo does not "use" the native toolkit as an application that is natively written with that toolkit does. It is better described as OOo is using the toolkit to just draw the widgets on the screen.

Re:What's the point?

[Karma Farmer]

Not many people drive Ferrari sports cars either... yet you don't hear many people complaining that Ferrari is being prevented from getting to the mass market.

That's not a valid comparison. Ferrari sports cars use the same infrastructure as any other car: the same roads, the same fuel delivery network, the same vehicle registration laws, etc.

Right now, computers are much more like the railroads were a hundred and fifty years ago -- a mess of different, incompatible standards that don't work together, and are an impediment to wider adoption.

Re:What's the point?

[jbolden]

I think so. One of the advantages of open source is to be able to go experiment by going in two different directions trying both and eventually settling on whichever one works better. Open Office is making the assumption that the number one criteria for an office suite is that it act like MSOffice and that it be able to interoperate with their file formats. KOffice is looking more to integrate the office functions into the entire desktop experience (like the way Apple integrates multimedia).

Re:What's the point?

[arodland]

Yeah, 150 is just about right. Just when they were finally unifying on a standard gauge. Groups like freedesktop.org and OASIS are working on making it possible for people to make their own software choices, and still have their software interoperate with the rest of the world. It's about as close to win-win as it gets. It doesn't matter who builds your sleeper cars, as long as they hitch up and roll.

Re:What's the point?

[jbolden]

I haven't seen a huge number of potential switchers give up because they couldn't pick a distribution. Within each major distribution the desktops are fairly consistent (lets say to the level of consistency one saw in apps / interfaces about 10 years ago on Windows and Mac). I think the thing holding the Linux desktop back in the US is simply that a few hundred dollars isn't much to pay for a superior office productivity desktop and right now the Windows / Office pairing is far better than either Gnome/OpenOffice or KDE/KOffice. But that's an entirely different statement then saying that diversity of desktops is the problem I personally think its an advantage long term.

A good example of this is what's happened with Mozilla vs. Konq or Gnome vs. KDE where they have gone in vastly different directions both of which have turned out well.

Re:What's the point?

[Qwavel]

I'm not sure what you are referring to, but OOo 2.0 does not use native widgets - it fakes them.

There are a variety of ways to do native support - faking it is the worst in my opinion.

Yet another reason why there is a need for office suites other than OOo.

But please make KOffice available on Windows. You would multiply your potential user base hugely.

Re:What's the point?

[minus_273]

well you can run a native Koffice on OSX without java like OpenOffice. In OSX you just compile with Qt for OSX.

Re:What's the point?

[N3Roaster]

At the time it was a donated copy of NT, meaning it was on hand and free of cost. Were it not, NT was still pretty easy to find (XP was still a long way off). Configuration was a bit of a pain for no other reason than supporting the one ultra-beefy (for the time) Mac the school already had (we added a network card to it), but it's still running and about the only thing that's been changed from the initial installation is that the school has upgraded the network connection to something faster than the donated dial up account.

Would I do the same thing today? Probably not. Linux is much better now than it was at the time this was being set up. Dial on demand and IP masquerading could be done, but it was awful to configure and the management software was much harder to use than what was available with NT. From a security standpoint, keeping up with issues under NT was much easier than it would have been with Linux if for no other reason than people with NT experience were more available than people with Linux experience. You could make a case for using a BSD, but the chances would still be pretty non-existant that the staff could make changes to the configuration as needed (this is, remember, an elementary school that had been using Apple //e computers almost exclusively).

There haven't been any complaints (which could be because the setup is working well (my guess as they did upgrade the Internet connection) or it could be because everything was done by volunteers at no cost). I believe this really was the best solution for this particular situation available at the time.

Sorry, no Google links. Google was not an option at the time.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

KOffice is a free, open source office suite. There was _no_ such thing at the time when it was started, so it was very much a solution to a problem that did exist.

Since then, Sun bought StarOffice and opened it as OpenOffice, but they're very different products, and I see no reason why the KOffice team should just throw away years of good work because Sun start throwing their weight around.

Re:What's the point?

[Trogre]

Yes - kOffice doesn't require Java.

Re:What's the point?

[JabberWokky]

Ferrari sports cars use the same infrastructure as any other car: the same roads, the same fuel delivery network, the same vehicle registration laws, etc.

Yes, and computers use the same roads (TCP/IP, usually over Ethernet or PPP), the same fuel delivery network (USB for data and IDE for storage, which wasn't the case in the early days of PCs), the same vehicle registration laws... okay, you don't yet have to register your computer...

Seriously - using KDE, I can log into my bank, view a movie, type up an invoice in KWord and send it via email to a client (as either a PDF, so they can't alter it, or as a RTF .doc which Word can read). The infrastructure works fine - I can get to my bank, see a movie, conduct business and deliver invoices - whether I am using KDE, OSX or Windows. They all just work.

--
Evan

Re:What's the point?

[KwKSilver]

Well said.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but that only shows you have no idea how a Ferrari works.

A regular Ferrari has a very low clearance. In even slightly "wavy" ground, you can pretty much destroy it. In many roads a crappy Toyota can handle without worry, a Ferrari will die.

The fuel is regular... well, kind of. Don't use anything below 100 octanes unless you want to hear a V12 motor coughing.

As for registration laws... well, yeah. But you can't insure them easily. And insurance is mandatory. A whole lot of Ferraris are not street-legal.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant to say "All of the money and best-paid coders"

Re:What's the point?

[stilborne]

http://kde.openoffice.org/
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~kendy/blog/

if you go to either of those two URLs above, you'll see that your assertion that GNOME is where is where "all the OpenOffice" integration work is being done is less than accurate.

Re:What's the point?

[mibus]

The biggest difference I can see between KIOSlaves and Gnome-VFS is that KIOSlaves are decently supported by KDE apps.

Gnome-VFS is used so painfully infrequently...

(I'm a GNOME user; I've hacked Meld to be G-VFS aware and am really looking forward to having a real G-VFS-aware gedit so I can finally stop using smbmount!)

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

A regular Ferrari has a very low clearance. In even slightly "wavy" ground, you can pretty much destroy it.

LOL... riiiiighhhht. So, you've never driven one, then.

Re:What's the point?

[Nasarius]

But please make KOffice available on Windows. You would multiply your potential user base hugely.

It'll probably come along with KDE4, which is being ported to Windows thanks to Qt4.

Re:What's the point?

[BRonsk]

Under it all is the command line. That is universal, my friend...

Once I got to a friend desktop and tried to find something for him. He had set his bash in vi mode. I just couldn't do anything with that piece of crap. I didn't even know how to get back to a "normal" bash.

I am sure you can find something better as far as universality is concerned.

Re:What's the point?

[10Ghz]

Well, considering that

a) Koffice was there before Open Office was
b) Koffice offers wider selection of apps
c) Koffice is a native KDE-app
d) Koffice is lightweight

So why exactly should Koffice-developers (who are also KDE-developers) start hacking on Open Office (a non-KDE app, that is a huge, lumbering mass, and offer less apps with it)? And looking at Point A, shouldn't Open Office coders hack on Koffice instead? I mean, it was there before Open Office was, OO is just splintering the marketplace.

And looking at what the Koffice-team has managed to accomplish, with only fraction of the resources the OO-team has, I'm not sure about your claim of OO having the best coders...

Re:What's the point?

[Santana]

You're certainly a troll, but I'll bite anyways. Each new release of KDE is FASTER and more polished; that's EVIDENT to anyone that has used KDE. It's curious you mention artwork, since KDE is particularly SO GOOD at it.

That hype you mention is non-sense. That has nothing to do with open source.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to take a look at Syllable. It's a non-Linux OS that addresses the very problems that make Linux ill-suited to general desktop use.

Re:What's the point?

[fr0dicus]

Are you sure? It feels more like they're directly on top of it. Or maybe it ate them.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two people and a shitload of hype does not equal "work". All the work on native widgets was done by GNOME/Windows hackers... a couple of KDE developers came along afterwards and rode their coattails to a Qt version. As for "where the work is done" (and it's more than just widgets)... Windows and GNOME integration is actually part of the OpenOffice project itself. I could set up a Bob's Big Desktop (BBD) integration project and request some space on the Office Office community projects server... and I'd be at the same level of KDE.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're certainly a troll, but I'll bite anyways. Each new release of KDE is FASTER and more polished; that's EVIDENT to anyone that has used KDE.

It's not evident to me.

It's curious you mention artwork, since KDE is particularly SO GOOD at it.

Your spurious USE of CAPS and STRANGE grammer and slightly too ENTHUSIASTIC support of KDE makes me think you are a ZEALOT... and your opinion carries LITTLE weight.

Re:What's the point?

[fr0dicus]

I hate the diversity. Give me one product that gets 90% of the way there over several that only manage 60%.

Re:What's the point?

[fr0dicus]

It's just not going to be adopted though, realistically it's going to do about as well as Ogg/Vorbis... which no-one outside of this website and its kind cares about.

Re:What's the point?

[gilesjuk]

You will never have inter-operability in technology while you have propriatary code, patents, DMCA etc..

Companies see their source code as their lifeblood.

Re:What's the point?

[BRonsk]

She knows a number of things. She knows clicking in the cross at the top right will close the window. She knows that the small bar will iconify (in the taskbar). She knows ESC will close a dialog box. She knows where to find MS Word (In the start menu). She knows a bunch already, even if it seems null to us nerds.

All of these she can show anyone that might be even less computer knowledgeable.

Using Linux this is just not possible. One person will use KDE, the next one Gnome, the other openbox and the last one will just use console with no X-Win because its computer should be in a museum. But they all use Linux. And all of the things described above can be just radically different on any of these linux systems.

What the mass wants is not something you can configure. They want something already configured which is not too annoying. And Linux is not there yet, that's all I'm saying.

Re:What's the point?

[FidelCatsro]

;) wouldnt be the first thats very permeable though

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually when I used OpenOffice 1.1.3 with Ximian KDE patches, it dealt with KIO slaves perfectly.

Red Carpet builds have a KDE file picker, I guess they support KIO slaves too. I have NOT tested them, so I might be wrong.

On a side note, I tried to get the KDE file picker from there, with my OO instalation with no luck. And that's interesting (this is not from the Red Carpet build):
milko@xenon:/opt/openoffice.org1.9.109/program$ strings fpicker.uno.so | grep -i kde
com.sun.star.ui.dialogs.KDEFolderPicker
com.sun.star.ui.dialogs.KDEFilePicker

Re:What's the point?

[Filip22012005]

Is Kraft cheese bundled with KDE?

Re:What's the point?

[ahfoo]

Hey even Kwrite kicks ass.
You want to write up list of long commands for a script and you need a lightweight editor? There's nothing wrong with Kwrite. I mean the fact is, it's bloated as hell compared to zile or nano and definitely a second choice if you have nedit, but if all you have in X is xedit or something nasty like that, and I use a distro like that which happens to be a language localization so it does happen sometimes that the choices get slim once you get beyond mainstream English distros. But when editors are lacking, it's not the end of the world if you need to use Kwrite to do a lot of text replacing and take care of word wraps to keep it clean and do other nice editor fun. I would argue that Kwrite goes far beyond Windows Write or whatever they started calling it these days.
That Kexi does look interesting. And Krita, well jeez most distros I use already have both Gimp 1 and 2 and I tend to think of them as fairly lightweight distros. So, in a way Krita looks a bit like bloat, but I bet it's a tiny addition so more the merrier. Besides, Knoppix is going to go full time with a DVD version now so what's a few extra Ks. I just want to see stuff that starts fast and is stable. If there's redundancy, well that's not a problem as long as it's not ads or sneaky who knows what crap code. And you know it aint that. So, why not.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, go *look* at a ferrari. Those things usually have a bout 4" clearance. Sure you can raise them, but factory standard, they can't handle a speedbump.

Re:What's the point?

[orcrist]

I mean the fact is, it's bloated as hell compared to zile or nano and definitely a second choice if you have nedit

I know this thread is already dead, but I just had to answer this. The one and only thing that finally dragged me from nedit, was its continuing inability to handle UTF-8. I still use it for the occasional jotting down of quick text files or such, and I miss some of its interface features (mouse dragging of text, *good* block selecting, etc.), but I have to deal with UTF-8 files so often now, that it's useless for most of my work-related editing :-( Ah, well...

-chris

Re:What's the point?

[listen]

Qt does exactly the same thing as VCL, OOs toolkit.

In fact, each version of MS Office comes with totally raped up controls that are not entirely native, and don't work in the same way as the native controls.

Tbh, I'd love to hear about your better ways of doing it. I'm guessing they are actually worse, and probably based on a fantastical notion of how usable SWT is. Hint: not very.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok but a Ferrari helps me to get girls. How about your favorite office software?

Re:What's the point?

[JabberWokky]

No, no... remember, KDE is European, so it is bundled with a nice fragrant Kryddost.

--
Evan "I like a nice Gouda with cumin... Mmmm..."

Re:What's the point?

[Dalcius]

The most important axiom in regards to this topic, as I've always said, is:

"Good defaults, lots of options."

Users need good defaults that allow them to get going quickly and that allow them to interoperate with other users and software. Users also need access to options that break compatibility but allow flexibility (such as nonstandard window managers and apps). The user turns on options as his/her own risk; this is how it should be. This is not an either-or situation, unfortunately most people don't recognize this.

Emphasizing this axiom when designing software will balance your software between normal users and people who like to customize their computing environments. You CAN keep both crowds happy; power users don't mind seeing a healthy set of options and newbies won't ever bother, they'll use the software regardless. Applying intelligent organization is the filling that makes this work.

That all said, there is a LOT to like about Linux, the free aspect -- as in both beer and speech -- being a huge part of that.

Still, as big of a Linux nut as I am, they have a long way to go before Linux becomes useful on the desktop without someone around to support it. The flipside of what I'm saying is that people with a geek in the family or companies with a competent IT department can use it wonderfully.

Cheers

Re:What's the point?

[fvwmfan]

wtf are you talking about, and wtf is your point?

Re:What's the point?

[BRonsk]

Someone is claiming that a command line is universal. I'm just saying it's not. As with everything else in UNIX, it is highly configurable up to the point to prevent usability by someone unaware of this specific configuration.

I call that configurable 'ad nauseum' ;-) I don't know if that makes any sense, but it sounds cool...

Sarge

[XanC]

Dang it, too late for Sarge!

I'm sure there will be .debs available on KDEs site soon though.

Re:Sarge

[JabberWokky]

I had already installed my Kubuntu debs before this article was posted.

--
Evan

Re:Sarge

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang it, too late for Sarge!

Wow, never thought I'd read that!

Re:Sarge

[barnaclebarnes]

If it had been released before sarge that would have delayed satge until sometime in 2008 with all the extra testing to make sure it was stable...

Expect More Interest

[EZR-2000]

Due to the OpenOffice.org Java backlash, expect to see a spike in interest in KOffice, especially considering that, being written in Qt, it should, at least theoretically, compile natively on Windows and (unlike OOo) Mac OS X. However, it's not as if the FLOSS community is hunky-dory about Qt; see the old Harmony project for more on that.

Re:Expect More Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

It's still not portable. It may be using Qt but it also uses KDE and generally speaking there is a ton of that low level KDE stuff that simply will never run on Windows.

Re:Expect More Interest

[JabberWokky]

However, it's not as if the FLOSS community is hunky-dory about Qt; see the old Harmony project for more on that.

That was before Qt was GPLed. It's now completely Free Software (with caps). When Qt 4.0 is released, rumor has it that the Windows version will be GPLed as well.

--
Evan

Re:Expect More Interest

[DogDude]

You do understand that when you talk about "more interest" because of the "OpenOffice.org Java backlash" that you're talking about a user base of probably only a few thousand people who know what in the hell you're talking about, right?

Re:Expect More Interest

[spencerogden]

There is plenty of work going on right now to get KDE to compile on Windows. IIRC older versions of KMail already compile.

Re:Expect More Interest

[bhalo05]

Not a rumor ;)

QT 4 announcment

Re:Expect More Interest

[bhalo05]

Kexi can already work under Windows. http://www.kexi-project.org/about.html Give it time...

Re:Expect More Interest

[abigor]

Wow, you're right. I'll bet no one on Slashdot ever noticed that before. And here I was thinking that most of the world used open source office software. What a dummy I am! Those of us who have been reading Slashdot for, what, six, seven years, simply hadn't noticed this! Hey, thanks for pointing this out, man! You really tell it like it is! Peace out, dude! Keep on truckin'!

Re:Expect More Interest

[Excelsior]

Due to the OpenOffice.org Java backlash, expect to see a spike in interest in KOffice

I suspect you overestimate the amount of people who care more about RMS's ethics than getting the job done. The fact is, businesses everywhere are building their entire infrastructure on Java. I doubt any of them is going to stop using Ooo because it has some minor dependencies on Java. The Microsoft shops certainly couldn't care less about RMS's ethics. And I doubt even the majority of the rare 100% OSS shops care.

If KOffice gains interest, I hope it is because KOffice is a good product, not because it is 100% Java free.

Re:Expect More Interest

[Brandybuck]

The FLOSS community in general loves, and has always loved, Qt. The only holdouts are GNU, Debian and Redhat. No one else has any problems with it.

It has been demonstrated time and time again that there will always be a miniscule but extremely shrill segment that hates Qt and will come up with any excuse to shit on it. For a while the excuse was that Trolltech didn't apologize to Richard Stallman (seriously!), then it was that it wasn't crossplatform enough (go figure). For a while it was that the Canopy Group owned a tiny fraction of their shares. The current excuse seems to be either that it's written in C++, or that it doesn't use all of C++'s features. People who hate it will always come up with a reason, no matter how absurd, to hate it.

Re:Expect More Interest

[Anonymous Coward]

The `dude' is clearly an idiot. Just check his comment history.

Re:Expect More Interest

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Ah, but these are the few thousand who count to those who are tracking the evolution of Free Software, because these are the few thousand active developers thinking about switching where they put their effort. That is enough of a delta to matter.

Re:Expect More Interest

[jbolden]

I don't see much evidence that any of these guys are "holdouts".

By GNU I assume you mean the FSF in which case QT is now a GPLed product. They are happy. Stallman has even indicated this. Debian long ago dropped any issues they had. RedHat is Gnome house but they are actively working to try and end any hard feelings that exist. At this point KOffice for example considers the RH-enterprise version to be the most debugged for a platform.

It seems to be HP, IBM, Sun, CA, etc... that are against QT and not because they don't believe its an excellent product but rather because they don't want a "QT tax" on vertical apps for Linux.

Re:Expect More Interest

[stuuf]

My problems with Qt are not language- or license-related. I just think it's ugly, with many features copied from Windows. File browser dialogs by default appear as a side-scrolling multicolumn list, which requires a lot of up and down eye movement to find a specific file by name. None of the themes that come with KDE are very good, and it's difficult to find/install/tweak new ones. Most are poor knock-offs of Motif or Windows (ew) or older KDE releases. Keramic is hideous. Plastik is the only one that I find remotely usable. Gnome on the other hand includes 4 or 5 decent themes for GTK. The other thing I don't like about KDE is how they seem to implement their own replacement for every other existing library in an attempt to make sure every line of every program on the desktop originated in the KDE project (or Trolltech).

Re:Expect More Interest

[Brandybuck]

Troll!

The default file dialog in Qt uses its platforms native file dialog. But X11 doesn't have a native dialog. So it made one. If you don't like it QFileDialog, however, you can use KFileDialog instead. Or write your own. Problem solved. As for which kind of file dialog is best, I prefer Qt's native file dialog ot GTK+' dialog.

While you may not like any of the KDE themes, other people may not like any of the GNOME themes. This doesn't make them wrong and you right, however.

Knockoffs of Motif and Windows? WTF? There are only two Motif-like themes, one of which is a direct rippoff of the default GTK+ theme! Yes, you heard me right! If the MotifPlus look is good enough for GTK+, why isn't it good enough for KDE? And there's only one Windows like theme. Funny, GNOME has one Windows like theme too! You mention Keramik, but that's no longer the default. You never had to use it anyway. Yes, it is kind of ugly. But at the time it came out it created a splash in the community, because it was something new and different. It was only a matter of weeks before the GTK+ community came up with their Geramik clone. Plastik the new default, however, and I'm glad that you find is vaguely usable. But go look at some other themes. There's Phase which is another modern style in a different vein. There's a .NET and a few minimalist styles as well. Then go to kde-look.org and you'll find dozens more. Like Baghira, which is a continuation and immense improvement of the old Liquid. Also Alloy, Lipstick, Thin Keramik (a big improvement over its namesake), ActiveHeart, Krisp, Qinx, Comix, etc, etc.

Rewriting libraries? I'm not sure what you're talking about. In fact I'm completely confused. You must have KDE confused with something else. The tiny handful of core KDE libraries are dwarfed by the dozens needed by another desktop.

Re:Expect More Interest

[ajs318]

I am pissed off to the back teeth about haring about how "Finally QT for Windows is GPL'ed." Please.

GPL is GPL. You can't GPL a unix version and not a Windows version. The GPL does not allow you to restrict what platform other people can run your source code on.

If I had the patience and the ability, I could legally persuade KDE to compile on a modified ZX Spectrum, and nobody would be able to stop me. {80s computer magazines with type-in BASIC listings actually encouraged porting}. If I had to modify the code so far beyond recognition that it would be considered a new work in its own right {with the tiny portion of original KDE code remaining covered by statutory Fair Dealing exemption}, then I would be able to licence it how I liked; even BSD or MS EULA.

I don't blame TrollTech for not bringing QT to Windows sooner. I blame the Windows programmers, who are obviously too busy writing viruses, worms, adware, spyware and spamming tools to port a GPL application library. Of course, it probably doesn't help much that QT was written in C++ rather than BASIC.

Re:Expect More Interest

[JabberWokky]

You are angry for something that never happened. They never released a package that was under GPL for Unix but not for Windows. They did, however, release "Qt for X", a software package, under the GPL, and did not release "Qt for Windows", which is a different software package with a different codebase, under GPL.

Qt is an API (and lately, a language extension). The various codebases, because they all implement that same API, share quite a bit of code. They differ quite a bit in other areas. You might as well be pissed that gcc is GPL and MS Visual C++ isn't.

--
Evan

Re:Expect More Interest

[anno1602]

GPL is GPL. You can't GPL a unix version and not a Windows version. The GPL does not allow you to restrict what platform other people can run your source code on.

Right, but what TT did pre-Qt4 was to GPL the sources for the Qt/X11 port and not those for the Qt/Windows port. Of course, that did not legally stop anybody from taking the GPL'ed Qt/X11 and porting it to Windows. In fact, some poeple had started doing just that. They were not finished last time I checked, and I don't know the status of the project now that a GPL'ed Qt/Windows is available.

Re:Expect More Interest

[m50d]

It's GPL, which arguably makes it more free than GTK, and certainly freer than Sun's funky licenses. The license issue that the harmony project and even gnome were meant to address is 4 years old, the only reason people still care is gnome keeps spreading FUD about it.

Re:Expect More Interest

[ajs318]

What I am saying is that, since one version of Qt was under the GPL, anyone could quite legitimately have created a Windows port. They didn't. To my mind, that looks a lot as if they just couldn't be bothered.

The Free Software and Open Source communities spend a lot of time studying how things work, often out of necessity since the big players don't want to tell us. Hell, between us we've written more than enough software for a complete computing experience using only Free and Open Source software -- and told the Windows people how to go about it, while we were at it. Of course the APIs will be different between X and Windows. X is more abstracted because it doen't make assumptions about the underlying OS; Windows pretty much is the underlying OS.

Nonetheless, all it would have taken would have been a bit of hard work; but that hard work was not forthcoming. Conclusion, Windows programmers can't be bothered.

Re:Expect More Interest

[Kjella]

Nonetheless, all it would have taken would have been a bit of hard work; but that hard work was not forthcoming. Conclusion, Windows programmers can't be bothered.

It is not as much that, but it would be a fork. It would never be merged with the Trolltech code base. Every time they released a new version, you would have to do merges and regression tests. It would not be a "bit" of hard work, it would require a sustained commitment to maintain a Windows port. And I dare say that many of the people who are hooked on Qt, got hooked on Linux first. Obviously, they're less interested in porting Qt to Windows.

Kjella

Re:Expect More Interest

[loqi]

Nonetheless, all it would have taken would have been a bit of hard work; but that hard work was not forthcoming. Conclusion, Windows programmers can't be bothered.

Ahem

mirror of video

[Anonymous Coward]

http://qartis.com/krita.avi

No Windows version?

[DogDude]

Why no Windows version? Are they deliberately trying to be anti-competitive? How is this fair to Windows users? Are they trying to stifle Windows usage? Where's the DOJ when you need 'em?

And yes, this was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.

Re:No Windows version?

[Trollstoi]

Main Entry: open 1 : having no enclosing or confining barrier : accessible on all or nearly all sides Main Entry: source 3 : a firsthand document or primary reference work From: http://www.webster.com/

Re:No Windows version?

[Anonymous Coward]

guess what? you like the man pole join the gnaa

Re:No Windows version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you take the source and make one?

Re:No Windows version?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, there probablly will be a windows version after they switch to qt4

Re:No Windows version?

[m50d]

It's in the works for when Qt4 is out, KDE4 is going to run natively on windows. Look how long it took OOo to get native support for OSX.

Re:Smoking server?

[ProfaneBaby]

The /. effect really kills dynamic sites and those that haven't recompiled Apache 1.3 to support more than 256 connections. There's no problem serving a few hundred simultaneous copies of that movie from a decent server - it's going to get cached in RAM, and bandwidth is almost never the limiting factor (connections and CPU are).

The news has to get out sometime

[udderly]

Sooner or later you would think that people are going to realize that the vast, vast majority of users can do without MS Office and its $400 price tag. I hope that it's sooner!

Re:The news has to get out sometime

[bwalling]

Sooner or later you would think that people are going to realize that the vast, vast majority of users can do without MS Office and its $400 price tag. I hope that it's sooner!

Near as I can tell, KOffice doesn't run on Windows.

Re:The news has to get out sometime

[jbolden]

I'm really not so sure about that. there are a lot of MSOffice powerusers out there that do a lot with Excel (macros, multiple worksheets, ODBC connect...), Word (automated mail merges, automated document formatting, specialized add-ons like bibliography programs) and especially Access.

That is something like 2% of the population. They support something like 20% of the population by giving them advanced features. The nice thing is this 2% will be easy to convert once we genuinely have a superior OSS office suite they are similiar to the windows users who switched over to Mozilla/firefox in the last 2 years.

Re:The news has to get out sometime

[westlake]

you would think that people are going to realize that the vast, vast majority of users can do without MS Office and its $400 price tag.

Let us know when you find someone who has paid retail list for a legit copy of Office. Student-Teacher Edition can be found at $150 and under and installs on three PCs.

Re:The news has to get out sometime

[arodland]

Actually, I'm reasonably sure that an ancient version of it does, though you probably need an X server. Maybe with Qt 4 being free on windows, as it appears it will be, KDE will pick up on windows. Or maybe not. It doesn't affect me all that much.

Re:The news has to get out sometime

[Bert64]

Actually it does, there is an "MP" (multiplatform) version which runs on windows, but it's commercial (and still quite cheap) because the qt libraries are not gpl licensed on windows..

Re:The news has to get out sometime

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The nice thing is this 2% will be easy to convert once we genuinely have a superior OSS office suite they are similiar to the windows users who switched over to Mozilla/firefox in the last 2 years.

I'm not sure that's really comparable. The only real disadvantage I've found in using Firefox rather than IE is the compatibility issue. In many other respects, it's (for me) a much nicer browser: I actively prefer things like tabbed browsing, the way bookmarks are handled, and the little touches like the find bar rather than a dialog obscuring your view.

OOo has none of these things going for it. As someone who's a fan and been using it at home for a long time, I've still yet to find anything it actually does better than MS Office, other than having a native PDF export (and obviously professionals will just get other software for that). OOo is great as a free alternative for the simple things, but it's a long way from competing with MS Office in the way Firefox competes with IE, and you still have the compatibility problems.

Re:The news has to get out sometime

[jbolden]

That's why I said "once we genuinely have a superior OSS office suite". I don't think we have one even close to equally good now. Firefox beat IE when:

1) Computers had unneeded speed so the speed advantages of IE weren't a big deal

2) Popups had become a serious problem. The web had become really hostile to IE

3) Firefox had extra features (better scaling, plugins, tabs...) which IE did not.

Which is to say Firefox was much better. And btw people still like using IE better because of websites that are tied to it.

OO is a long way from being genuinely better than MSOffice. I'm not sure how they catch up but if they keep improving rapidly it might happen. However I really think starting with MSOffice as the goal is screwing things up, for example I could picture LyX/Scribus evolving into a better combination for word processing by seperating WYSIWYG into: WYGIWYM and Desktop Publishing.

OpenDocument for Spreadsheets

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenDocument sounds great, but is the spreadsheet specification insufficient? Apparently Gnumeric will not be adding support for it[1]. Is KOffice supporting it for spreadsheets?

I want to see an open format for documents, including spreadsheets, so I'm concerned that OpenDocument might not be sufficient.

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/mortenw/2005/06/16/0

Re:OpenDocument for Spreadsheets

[dominator]

As Morten points out, their spreadsheet documentation is insufficient to build an implementation around.

However, the Nokia Maemo team will be helping AbiWord and Gnumeric improve their ODT import/export support[1]. For what it's worth, when I've been working on the SXW/ODT import/export in AbiWord, I only sparingly use the official specification, as it's too large and cumbersome to be of great use. It's so much easier to create interesting test cases and map those back to AbiWord's semantics. I imagine that the Nokia guys will be doing something similar when they add better ODT support in Gnumeric.

[1] http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/ 2005/Jun/0276.html

Re:OpenDocument for Spreadsheets

[teslatug]

Hmm, I wonder if those reasons could have played a part in MS not adopting the OpenDocument format. I mean if Gnumeric couldn't see it as a flexible enough format, what could MS Excel make of it with all of the extra features and legacy support it has to shoe in?

Re:OpenDocument for Spreadsheets

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not big on MS basing, but honestly I think that "we don't control it" is a good enough reason for MS to ignore the format. Supposedly everyone was invited to participate in the standardization to ensure that the features everyone needed were present (though I have doubts about how well that would really work). Microsoft chose not to participate, unsurprisingly. Personally I think that they have demonstrated many times in the past that customer lock-in is a major part of their corporate strategy.

Now the question is, why didn't Gnumeric participate? Or, if they did, why didn't they get the features they needed?

I thought so, too.

[imsabbel]

Until i read (and verified) that just about nobody outside sun does anything for openoffice.
Of the core group, only 4 are not sun employees, so there is nothing like e.g. the kernel or kde.

Re:I thought so, too.

[sydb]

An link would be nice, so we can verify your story.

Re:I thought so, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

A picture of your penis would be nice, so we can verify your gender.

Re:I thought so, too.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sorry, I don't have the link either. FWIW, I do remember seeing this information in a previous Slashdot discussion, though, along with a post by one of those four people explaining a bit about how it really worked.

Krita...

[Jugalator]

Krita is swedish for "chalk"... Maybe more languages too, I don't know.
It's probably behind the name anyway.

Re:Krita...

[Anonymous Coward]

At the maintainer of Krita I can say with confidence that you are right. That's where the name came from. I can't say I'm happy with it, though...

But Krita has always had trouble with naming. KImageShop, the first name was obviously unsuitable. The next name, Krayon, was nuked by the well-known German law shark von Gravenreuth. Kandinsky (my favourite) was mooted, but Krita was chosen -- years before my involvement in Krita.

But three names is enough, I'm not going for another rename!

Boudewijn Rempt

Re:Krita...

[ziggamon2.0]

And Rita is the Swedish word for "draw". With a K added to it to comply with all the other Koffice Kapplications.

Wanna bet your "probably" against mine?
Or maybe it's both?

Re:Krita...

[keosak]

In czech language it is kída -- krida without diacritics.

Re:Krita...

[IdleTime]

And in Norwegian it's slang for "credit"... :-)

Re:Krita...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Krita" could also mean "Crayon", which would be less dull. :-)

Re:Krita...

[Anonymous Coward]

krita -> kriit that is a estonian word for chalk.

you all probably know Sodipodi
Word "sodipodi" is a word that describes a drawing by small children who can not draw at all.
Give them a pen and paper and let them have some fun. The result is total sodipodi ;)

Re:Krita...

[Anonymous Coward]

At the maintainer of Krita I can say with confidence that you are right. That's where the name came from. I can't say I'm happy with it, though...

If it is of any confort, I like it pretty much :-)
The the Italian translator of Krita

An interesting thing to watch

[erroneus]

HTML is supposed to be a "standard" but it's often forgivable when pages render differently from machine to machine and browser to browser. (Forgivable to an extent)

But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation. I haven't looked at the specs for this document format (and I do not plan to unless I have a week or more of insomnia) so I don't know how detailed the description is. But now that OO.o and KOffice both support the format, it will be interesting to write something in one and open in the other. My hopes are that whatever I do in one will look identical in the other.

(With OO.o being cross-platform and all, why would KOffice be used? I gave up on AbiWord in favor of OO.o for that very reason...)

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[delire]

(With OO.o being cross-platform and all, why would KOffice be used? I gave up on AbiWord in favor of OO.o for that very reason...)

For what very reason?

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Just Some Guy]

HTML is supposed to be a "standard" but it's often forgivable when pages render differently from machine to machine and browser to browser.

Forgivable? Expected! No one should reasonably think that a page will render the same on IE at 640x480 as Konqueror at 1600x1200. The web is not print; it's a complete different media.

But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation.

People who expect word processor documents to be to-the-pixel identical on different machines are on crack. What if the recipient of your document uses a different paper size than you (eg letter vs A4)?

If you need exact positioning, then use a page layout system or language. Getting consistent results from a word processor is simply coincidental, even if that's what usually happens. Chalk it up to luck and plan better next time if it's really important to you.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[JabberWokky]

HTML is a standard - but it is not a rendering standard. HTML is supposed to look different on different browsers. In fact, quite a bit of how it is designed is based on the concept that different browsers will have different capabilities and will display the page differently. It is a markup language, which is why tags are named things like address, credit, and em (for emphasized). It does not define how a section is displayed as emphasized, just that it is supposed to be rendered with emphasis.

Standards for layout, like Postscript, tend to do better at the things you want them to. But then, that's like saying a boat takes you across water better than a city bus.

--
Evan

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[erroneus]

ah. You got me. I didn't know they had a Windows version. I made and assumption and I was wrong. Last time I used AbiWord was a long time ago, admittedly... and I don't recall using it on anything but RedHat...7.0 was the last release I recall using it on and that was a while ago...

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[schon]

People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation.

(Ignoring your implication that there are differing levels of "exact")...

Let me know when MS gets it right. In MS-Word, changing your *printer driver* can affect the layout of the page.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Kafka_Canada]

You should give it another shot -- it's gotten much better since then, no longer crashes, more functional than OOo, and obviously a hell of a lot faster and smoother.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah RH7... check out the latest versions of Abiword. You'll be seriously impressed. It starts lightning quick (and that's not an overstatement), even the Linux version... and it has all the functionality any normal user would need.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[PhotoGuy]

People who expect word processor documents to be to-the-pixel identical on different machines are on crack. What if the recipient of your document uses a different paper size than you (eg letter vs A4)?

I call BS on this. On different papers, yes, the layouts would be different. And that's what a word processor is for, in general, rendering something onto paper. If a Linux and a Windows version of the same word processor (or format) were showing a document for printing on 8.5x11 paper, there's no reason they shouldn't show exactly the same layout of the items on the "virtual paper" before the printing occurs. To have it otherwise is disconcerting.

That's why the page format is stored in the document; this document was intended for letter; this document intended for A4. Put the right stock in the printer, and you should get consistent results.

Having OpenOffice render opened word documents differently from Word, is a problem; it's getting a *lot* better at that, thankfully.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Brandybuck]

KDE on Windows is coming. The purpose is not to run one desktop on top of another, but to provide the framework to run KDE applications on Windows. Such as KOffice.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the kind words, but it's not all true (yet?).
OOo writer surely has way more features than AbiWord does, but yes, many people are using AbiWord as part of their day to day work and prefer it over OO.
Also there are crashers left in our bugzilla, but we're busy closing them for our upcoming 2.4 release.

Rob
http://www.abisource.com/~rob/

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Karma Farmer]

On different papers, yes, the layouts would be different.

No, it won't. Any sane and sensible page layout program specifies the size of the print area, not the size of the margins. And, if your word processor allows you to set either, it's a pretty good indication that it's intended to be used as a page layout program, not as general purpose text editor.

If other word processors are making the mistake of copying MS Word's broken behaviour on something this simple, I shudder to think what other stupid mistakes the implementors are blindly copying instead of bothering to get right.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[jbolden]

Given you write an OSS app people may want to search for your comments by name. I really think you should get an account here.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Kafka_Canada]

Well the crashes have at least been drastically reduced -- when I first tried AbiWord it was too unstable to use, and I personally have never seen the latest series crash, although you say there are a few potential crash bugs remaining. In terms of features, it's got all I ever use, and when I said it's more featureful than OOo I guess I also had gnumeric-to-OOo comparison in mind.

Anyway, thanks a million for the great app., and good luck with those improvements. I'm not the only one who will be greatly appreciative of all the improvements, big and small. Once I start getting paychecks from my new job, I'll be sure to make some contributions (which I see from the website you are accepting).

Thanks again!

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Anonymous Coward]

I love Abiword and have been using it since the pre-1.0 days (indeed, I have fixed a few minor bugs myself and my secret name is somewhere hidden in the Abiword list of contributers).

The only time I didn't use AbiWord was when I had the smooth-scrolling problem; while editing the AbiWord.Profile by hand to disable smooth scrolling does address the issue for those of us with ancient, dog-slow video cards (NeoMagic chipset anyone), it would be nice if there was an easier way to turn off this feature, or even have AbiWord turn it off automagically if it sees that smooth scrolls take too long.

Yes, I know. I'll have to contribute another patch to AbiWord.

The program is really, really great; keep up the good work!

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, well, I can see his reluctance. I also write an OSS app, and left Slashdot because I was sick and tired of anonymous cowards flaming my application. Slashdot is the only place where I have gotten baseless criticism for my program.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[snilloc]

Not sure if it's still that way, but WordPerfect in the not-so-distant past worked that way too. (Whatever version was current circa 2002.)

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[stuuf]

Word processors file formats are best used for writing a document and printing it yourself. For publishing a text document on the web or through email, HTML is more than enough. If you need precise layout that a professional print lab can understand, use PostScript.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[FidelCatsro]

Undeserved criticism definantly , Abiword is great .
Light-weight , runs well on all my platforms , small footprint ,Easy to use ,great file format . Much respect

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this tag you speak of?

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[julesh]

If a Linux and a Windows version of the same word processor (or format) were showing a document for printing on 8.5x11 paper, there's no reason they shouldn't show exactly the same layout of the items on the "virtual paper" before the printing occurs. To have it otherwise is disconcerting.

Of course, MS Word fails this particular test, even from Windows -> Windows running on a different machine. Just today I had to reformat a document before doing a PDF conversion on it[1] because there was a paragraph flowing onto the next page and leaving a nearly blank page in it where there wasn't on the original writer's machine.

For some reason I've never been entirely sure of, Word seems to vary its formatting slightly according to what printer driver you have selected as the default, which has weird affects on stuff. Particularly if you come across a document written by someone who uses tabs and no hard line breaks to write indented text...

[1]: Actually, I was using OO.o to do the conversion, but opened the document in word to determine if it had got the formatting any closer to the original; it had, but it still wasn't perfect.

Re:An interesting thing to watch

[julesh]

No, it won't. Any sane and sensible page layout program specifies the size of the print area, not the size of the margins.

The problem is that users want to specify margin size, because that's the most obvious part of it.

I think the correct way is to format for a particular size of paper, storing the details of that paper size in the document file, and then warn before printing (probably with an option to automatically correct) if your printer is configured for a different size of paper. This dialog could include options for keeping the printable area constant and keeping the margins constant, if desired.

Word of course stores the details of the document size in the printer but blindly prints onto any size paper without so much as a warning (unless the print area extends beyond the edge of the printer's printable area).

And if you add up how many sheets of paper I've wasted because the printer driver thought it had letter paper, Word wanted A4 and the printer really did have A4, it ain't insignificant!

YES!

[jb.hl.com]

War of the stupidly named image editors!

Krita vs. Gimp!

DIng ding! Round one!

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Krita seems to have a GUI that doesn't make you go "WTF?"

Re:YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

Krita isn't a stupid name if you're Swedish, and I highly suspect some of the authors are (I haven't checked). Krita means 'chalk' in Swedish.

Now go troll somewhere else.

Re:YES!

[jb.hl.com]

I actually rather like the GIMP's UI...I use it all the time, it's a pleasure.

Re:YES!

[killjoe]

Yes I much prefer fantastic and awsome product names like "word" or "money". I mean how can you beat "XP" or "2000". Those are real product names by golly.

I mean how can you not respect a product named after a year or a product whose entire name consists of two letters!.

Just don't be around when XP flips out and kills all those stupid open source names by cutting their heads off for no reason!

Re:YES!

[Klivian]

The maintainer at the time when the name changed to Krita was Swedish, if I remember correctly. And the translation was also correct, it's chalk. My swedish is a bit rusty, but I seem to recall that rita (loose the K) means 'draw' in swedish.

Re:YES!

[Quattro Vezina]

Ever tried using GIMP in Ion? It's a pain in the arse.

Yes, there is FloatWS, but that defeats the entire purpose of using Ion.

I find that lately I prefer using KolourPaint to GIMP. It plays nicer with Ion, and it actually has some tools that GIMP lacks...basic things, such as a line tool or a rectangle tool. Both of which I needed for something I've been working on.

The end of data

[LifeMatesCanada.Com]

This constant creation of new proprietary and competing formats will be the end of any sort of long term archiving. How many documents have I abandoned to oblivion because I couldn't convert them from star/sun/works/word perfect etc to office/open office etc..? Fast forward 100 years, and very little will be left for future scholars to read. ASCII DAMMIT! ASCII!!!!!!!!!

Re:The end of data

[askaggs3]

How many documents have I abandoned to oblivion because I couldn't convert them from star/sun/works/word perfect etc to office/open office etc..?

Didn't this start way back in the good ol' DOS days when Word and WordPerfect were competing in the late 80s? If I remember correctly, they purposely changed their file formats to try to keep their competitors from opening them while attempting to make their editor compatible with others' file formats.

Re:The end of data

[Biomechanical]

For one document my preference is XHTML documents with inline CSS styling. It's ASCII, and it can look nice too. :)

For multiple documents I'll use a separate CSS file(s).

Funny thing, I still get brain dead idiots asking me to send them a word document because either their email program displays the file inline and they don't know how to save an attachment to a separate file without Outlook/Express doing it for them OR their copy of Word is so old it doesn't recognise simple CSS, and I keep telling them "I don't own Word*". Shit, I even put simple instructions - I do tech support well, I know how to simplify the instructions - in the email saying in generally two steps how to view the document.

* Yes, I know about exporting from OO.o and KO and so on. I just don't like doing it unless I really have to.

Re:The end of data

[mrchaotica]

What the heck are you talking about? The entire point of OASIS is to fix that problem by creating a standard format!

Not to mention the fact that OASIS is ASCII, just with markup and gzipped.

Re:The end of data

[Joe Jarvis]

I actually think the greater danger is in human skill lock-in. As a U.S. federal employee, I can't tell you how many people are wed to WordPerfect or Word because that's what they know (and thus any other UI "doesn't make sense"). Software can always be upgraded or customized (say, in the future, to read outdated file formats). Trying to convince 50 of your coworkers to switch to a new tool and use it to its full potential is the hard part. That's why we should all support open-source usability standardization.

Re:The end of data

[Brandybuck]

Dammit, that's the rationale my boss is giving me to move to Windows development! Seriously!

"Come on," he says, "you can learn C#, I know you can! Why be an old fart using C++ and Unix when you can be like those hip and savvy .NET developers down at Starbucks? Your career will be stunted if you don't modernize yourself!"

Sigh.

Re:The end of data

[Anonymous Coward]

considering XHTML and CSS can be rendered to look differently on different platforms browsers etc your method is not a good one for anything but basic documents. Organisations require consisitency right down to positioning, look and feel etc.

Re:The end of data

[mattpalmer1086]

That's an interesting perspective. I can see that for individual businesses, this may be a harder problem.

From my perspective (I work at the UK National Archives), migrating and maintaining documents, web sites, spreadsheets, presentations, images, audio, video, virtual reality from public enquiries, databases... etc. etc. with the intention that people will be able to read them 1000 years later is our hard problem.

But we don't have to convince our users to upgrade to the tools that the content creator used - we upgrade the content to be in a format they can use without any worries - normally by sticking to open standards, or in the absence of widely spread open standards, de facto ones (like PDF).

Re:The end of data

[Anonymous Coward]

Unicode DAMMIT! Unicode!!!!!!!!!!

Kexi is awesome

[bhsx]

Kexi is a really exciting addition to KOffice. I've had my eye on it for a long time. The beta build process was a real bear; but I even got a few versions built. It was snappy and probably even easier to use than Access. You can search /. for a post from a couple years ago with me bitching about needing an Access replacement; with Kexi and Base (OO.o) we now have two! Awesome.

Re:Kexi is awesome

[jbolden]

I agree I can't wait for OSX versions. I was going to create a database application open source and couldn't think of any reasonable way to do it. 4D doesn't have a free version anymore, openbase now requires a server, Access is windows only, FileMaker isn't powerful enough (also non free)....

Re:Kexi is awesome

[vandan]

Check out my project: Project: Axis (Not Evil)

It's written in Perl, and uses Gtk2. I think both of these points make it ideal for RAD database development. It's *far* easier to write your application logic in Perl than in C++. And Gtk2 is also far superior to QT ( flame away ).

I've already got the whole setup working perfectly under Linux, Windows and OS-X. It includes a form module, datasheet module, and report writing module ( exports to PDF ).

So while you're waiting ... check it out. Maybe even help out with development :)

Kubuntu Packages and Live CD

[JRiddell]

Packages are available for Kubuntu as is a Live CD with KOffice 1.4 (and KDE 3.4.1).

Kubuntu Hoary KOffice CD and packages.

Krita = Crayon (swedish)

[TERdON]

Krita makes very much sense to me. Means "crayon" in swedish, which certainly seems appropiate.

Actually, it's even better than that. If you suspect the usual KDE naming convention (Add K in front of whatever), and remove the K, you get "rita". Which means "draw" in Swedish...

My only strange question is how it got that name, when none of the developers seems to have a swedish origin. Or am I missing someone?

more screenshots

[Karma Sucks]

On OSDir.com.

GIMP GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the GIMPs GUI roughly the same as Photoshops under MAC OS X?

Re:GIMP GUI

[typical]

For most of us, probably, but for people that use Photoshop day in and day out for years, the difference is probably something like telling an emacs user to use some other editor in emacs-keystroke-compatibility-mode.

I think GIMP is a fine image editor, but you aren't going to take a rabid Photoshop user and replace his copy with GIMP without making him quite upset.

Excellent troll

[Colin Smith]

What market are you talking about? Both are free. It's that monoculture thing again.

Monoculture bad, diversity good.

Coffee

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever made that Krita video should drink less coffee ...

People like you make me sick

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, did you even try Koffice?

It has applications Openoffice doesn't have, it uses a lot less resources, it's much better integrated into KDE and finally the applications work differently to their Openoffice counterparts.

Take kwrite. It's a framebased word processor which has a totally differnt work flow from oowriter.

Finally, how can mods mod the parent interesting? That's not interesting, it's simply smear and that's disgusting.

Re:People like you make me sick

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally found it interesting.

Re:People like you make me sick

[stilborne]

s,kwrite,kword,

Gooey

[BandwidthHog]

After seeing a screen shot or two, Krita suffers from one of the same problems as most other image editing apps: the interface elements are just too large and the open space around them too great. Most people using that type of software spend a lot of time with the interface, and tend to need a whole damn lot of interface on screen at all times; that begs for small, dense, highly visible widgets.

I get the impression that none of the windowing toolkits offer such widgets. Seems that Adobe had to roll their own for Windows and the old Mac OS (just checked Apple's dev tools: there are regular, small and mini sizes available for many things, if not all).

I think just having that look (and the increased efficiency of screen real estate it brings) would go a long way toward legitimizing open source graphics apps among their target audience.

Re:Gooey

[Brandybuck]

All you need is a new Qt theme. Call it "Crunched" or "Sardines" or something. A Qt application can use its own theme, so it doesn't have to installed system wide.

Re:Gooey

[vurian]

Well -- I do in fact agree with the above poster. I have tried various ways of making the widgets in the dockers smaller -- removing space between widgets, some bloody-minded code to ensure small, but readable fonts. But in the end, it's a problem with toolkit. Using a new Qt theme wouldn't help all the way, because the dialogs should still use the standard widget set.

So I just decided not to bother and use my precious time to create features and fix bugs.

Boudewijn

That is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Our company is 100% OpenDocument format. We can use any program we want, so long as docs are stored in OpenDocument. So now we have two choices: OpenOffice and KOffice. Soon there will be a third: TextMaker from SoftMaker. As a KDE desktop user, getting KOffice to support OpenDocument is huge because KOffice will always be better-integrated than OOo. I'm already looking forward to the next release which will use OpenDocument as the native format.

Re:That is cool

[mrchaotica]

No, the third is AbiWord. TextMaker would be fourth.

Not everybody has Java

[Anonymous Coward]

As an ex-LFS/OpenBSD, now Gentoo, user, I didn't install Java and do no intend to do so just for running OOo. On the other hand, I'm a LaTeX guy myself.

Re:Not everybody has Java

[Santana]

I wonder why you left OpenBSD for Gentoo

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The devs have done a great job, but the UI team needs to some work here, most applications dont give more than 1/4 of working space, rest is filled with large buttons and widgets.

Re:Krap

[ColaMan]

It does make it difficult to find a piece of software by name in package managers - 6000 KDE programs all start with K, fer chrissakes.

So, say I want a KDE photo app...... Kphoto? Klab? Kimp? It seriously limits the availability of an average user to find your program if you tenuously manage to link a witty 'K-name' from a name that describes your app correctly.

MS Office compatibility

[teslatug]

So has anyone figured out if the new MS format will be license-compatible with the GPL or BSD or some OSS license?

It'd be great if OSS software had built-in support for the MS format before Office 12 was out. Sure MS, could break the format right before the release, but I bet they'd be reluctant as other companies would complain.

Re:MS Office compatibility

[m50d]

The XML format is compatible as far as copyright goes, but there may be patent issues. It might not be GPL-3 compatible (it's not apache-compatible) and under the GPLv2 it might not be distributable in some countries. However, unless I've missed something that's still not going to be the default format for saving.

Re:MS Office compatibility

[teslatug]

Yes, it will be the default for Office 12, and it will be backported for Office XP and 2000 as a patch, read it here.

KIOslaves are a bad idea

[typical]

You know, KIOslaves and gnome-vfs are both really bad ideas. There are great places for virtual filesystem code (kernel, userspace filesystems like fuse or lufs, or for wildly different interfaces, just simple stand-alone libraries), and libraries tied into desktop environments is not one (especially since lots of authors that might enjoy using this functionality aren't interested in tying their apps to KDE or GNOME).

Re:KIOslaves are a bad idea

[wobblie]

so, it's really bad, that when I pop in an audio cd in KDE, that I can rip the cd simply by dragging the audio files to a folder in my home directory?

Yeah. That sucks.

You obviously haven't thought about this.

Re:KIOslaves are a bad idea

[Just Some Guy]

There are great places for virtual filesystem code

...until you bring in cross-platform compatibility as a requirement. I run KDE on FreeBSD, not Linux, so kernel layers are right out. By the time you go through all the work of making nice, portable virtual filesystem layers, I imagine you'll inevitably end up with something at least as complex as KIO slaves anyway.

Re:KIOslaves are a bad idea

[CableModemSniper]

He's not talking about the idea being bad, he's talking about what level of the OS / Library / Application stack that the VFSs are implemented at. To put it another way, wouldn't it be awesome if you could not only drag the audio files from the cd to a folder in your home directory, but also perform the same action from the command line (using cp) or use GTK based app to edit the audio, etc.

Re:KIOslaves are a bad idea

[stilborne]

yes, they are highly convenient for KDE applications. you can use kioslaves with fuse, which is rather cool, but being separate entities allows for these things to work everywhere KDE does. it also makes for extremely easy development of apps that use that API.

so unsurprisingly, kio is really designed make life easy for KDE apps with an eye to portability. it would be nice if every OS out there offered a standard interface as coherent and cogent as kioslaves, but they don't.

Re:KIOslaves are a bad idea

[julesh]

You know, KIOslaves and gnome-vfs are both really bad ideas. There are great places for virtual filesystem code (kernel, userspace filesystems like fuse or lufs, or for wildly different interfaces, just simple stand-alone libraries)

I'm getting fed up of hearing this mantra repeated again and again. Here's a hint: google "kioslaves fuse bridge".

Re:Krap

[nutshell42]

Now apart from the fact that KDE isn't galone GNU/with MS-the iStupid ePrefixes, unless your package manager has a really strange layout, the apps starting with k should be sorted alphabetically by their second (and third, etc) letters so instead of finding the right app among 20000+ packages you only have to search for it in the 6000 kpackages.

So, say I want a KDE photo app...... Kphoto? Klab? Kimp? It seriously limits the availability of an average user to find your program if you tenuously manage to link a witty 'K-name' from a name that describes your app correctly.

There are more or less 3 categories:

• Apps that use K-description as their name (Kedit, Kcalc, etc) - easy to find
• Apps using a name describing their function but the C at the beginning of the name is replaced with a K - easy to find
• Apps using a non-descript name with some nifty use of a K somewhere in the name - not necessarily easy to find or apparent but it isn't worse than non-descript names for non-KDE applications either (why should Konqueror be any worse than Nautilus or Safari?)

Actually the fact that most KDE applications start with a K makes it easier to find the application you're looking for because at least you know that a K-something pkg probably doesn't contain some obscure database backend. When I was new to linux the X in front of X-apps was a great help and I don't see why new users now shouldn't think the same about K-apps and G-apps

Yes there is a point

[nurb432]

KO is smaller, faster and lighter weight then OO.

For 90% of the users out there, its features are more then enough..

Re:Yes there is a point

[metalmaniac1759]

For 90% of the users out there, its features are more then enough..

Where the hell do these people keep coming up with such numbers?

"Over 48.7% of all statistics are useless"

Nandz.

Re:Yes there is a point

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully it has a grammar checker for people like you, though. Go back to grade school and learn the difference between "then" and "than".

Re:Yes there is a point

[nurb432]

Perhaps i dont really care to bother with proper grammar or spelling here?

Proofreading posts on this forum is not worth my time... Posting for idiots like you to read barely is...

Other point of view

[brunes69]

You can look at it another way.. if I am looking for a photo editing app that is KDE-integrated, which do you think I would have more luck with? Krita, or Gimp? I can tell without even looking at the app's website that Krita will have better KDE integration.

That is the benefit of the naming convention - you know what is a KDE app and what is not. You don't need to waste your time on any GTK crap that can't even open an sftp:// link.

Open Source Names

[typical]

Actually, a lot of software in the open source world has really unfortunate names. Yes, those marketers may be a pain in the ass at work, but they do generally produce names that people can deal with.

Nobody demands that people take their volunteer work and then name it something that's maximally useful and no fun for them, but there are some times when it's quite regrettable that people have made choices.

* A good amount of open source and Unixy software is potentially offensive. The GIMP is a very obvious example. Some cultures have a problem with the GNOME startup foot. I've had the phrase "I'll go finger her and find out" elicit a few chuckles. When someone sees the phrase "spawning 50 children...killing children...warning, zombie child present", sure, it makes sense to people who do Unix, but it definitely weirds out some other folks.

* Some names are awkward. GNU/Linux is awkward, and is not going to catch on, ever (Stallman would be better off pushing for "GNUix" or something else). "umount" may be shorter than "unmount", but I doubt the typing savings are worth the confusion caused over the years...same goes for "passwd".

* Some names sound amateurish. "MySQL" is a good example.

* Some names are homonyms. "lynx" was already a pun, and then the "links" browser's name made life much more annoying for text-based browser users. "pyne" and "pine" are similar.

* Some names are inside jokes that then become incomprehensible and confusing to people who lack knowledge of 30 years of computing history. The "elm" email reader spawned "pine", "balsa", and "mahogany". Good luck explaining to someone why they type "mahogany" to read their email. The "more" text pager (which stuck the text "More" at the bottom of each screen, allowing the user to hit enter to see another line of text) was replaced by the "less" text pager -- "less is more" was probably uproariously funny when the code first started being produced, but is now just another barrier for the new Unix user.

* Some names have mutated into greater inexplicability. The "dillo" lightweight GTK web browser (aside from the unfortunate similarity to the English word "dildo") comes from "Armadillo".

* There is the infamous "GNOME projects start with 'g', KDE projects with 'k'". At one point, X11 applications went through this same growing phase with "x". GNOME seems to have thankfully stopped doing this, though the KDE folks *still* do this occasionally. Python-based applications frequently have a "py" prefix.

* Some authors (perhaps due to a fear that packagers will rename their software to make its name more difficult to type) make their software explicitly have a lower-case first letter, violating normal English capitalization rules. "xine" is a good example of this.

* Some authors take delight in difficult-to-say names. Depressingly, I'm writing this on a website called "slashdot.org".

Re:Open Source Names

[dsginter]

This is one of the best posts that I've read here in a while. Thanks for sharing the frustration!

Re:Open Source Names

[kv9]

Think of the children... Won't somebody please think of the children?!

Re:Open Source Names

[Anonymous Coward]

Regards the potentially offensive bit, this is not limited to open-source software. ISTR that the Master/Slave IDE designation was banned in some southern states for promoting racism. The moral of this story? Whatever you do, someone'll be offended - screw 'em.

Re:Open Source Names

[skazatmebaby]

I made the name of my OS program, "Dada Mail" awkward in an attempt to be unmarketable.

There's a full story here:

http://mojo.skazat.com/project/press_release_12_01 _03.html

and here:

http://mojo.skazat.com/project/

Hasn't really hurt me, and it's much better than having some jazzy marketable name.

QT now free [Really stale news]

[Hal XP]

Just in case you've been hiding under a rock the past few years: QT has already been relicensed under your choice of the GPL and Trolltech's own QPL. See http:///developer/faqs/license_gpl.html for details.

Very Wrong

[WindBourne]

What is more useful that a single product is multiple products that cooperate together. KO and OO do just that as they now use the file format. In this fashion, I can open a file in KO, work on it, then send it to you. Then you can open it in OO on your MS system (or mac, or BSD, or ...). No problem with the output and how it looks.

With MS office, it does not exchange nicely with anybody else. Worse, it does not exchange nicely with past version.

Your Sig

[Anonymous Coward]

This is /., No matter who or what your sister is, there are those here who will mod you down just because you offered that up. It may be there only chance at meeting a girl.

DTP functions

[Hal XP]

But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation.

The functions you describe are best covered not by a word processor but by a desktop publishing program like InDesign or Scribus. In most publishing setups, such as that of a magazine or a web site, one set of people handles the linguistic content (the writers and editors) and another set of people takes care of the graphical content (the designers, layout artists, photographers, illustrators or programmers). Of course, there should be coordination between the two. But generally their functions are distinct, like the hemispheres of the human brain.

More Open Source Names

[typical]

A few more:

* Another good offensive example, "pan", the popular GTK newsreader, started life as the "Pimp Ass Newsreader". It was hosted on superpimp.org (which, to this day, redirects to pan's homepage), and I suspect that the effort to purge the offensive background from pan and popular usage was not trivial.

* Occasionally open source names simply collide. The open source world is actually pretty good about this (partly because of the good databases of open source software), but the "Firebird" phase of Firefox's development collided with an open-source database project.

* Names for basic utilities that should be newbie-accessable should not seem bizarre. Of all the package management tools out there, I think the only two that were actually descriptively named were "Redhat Package Manager" and "A Package Tool" -- which became "rpm", and "apt", not necessarily intuitive, as they cleverly were converted into unrelated-sounding acronyms. We also have "emerge", "yum", "yup", "smart"...when the first thing that a new Linux user is expected to do is to type "yum update", he starts to wonder exactly what the rest of the commands look like.

* Some of the flood of clever acronyms that sound like something entirely unrelated -- "touch", or Time Of User CHange, "bash" for "Bourne Again SHell", "fish" (a utility designed to make software installation easier for new Linux users, yet named something that would never occur to a new user, and also having the same name as the Friendly Interactive SHell), and GNOME (the GNU Network Object Model Environment, a forced acronym if ever I heard one -- though I suppose that it was probably chosen in preference to GNUDE).

* Another common "play off an earlier command", "tac" is the reverse spelling of "cat", which is short for "concatenate files". "tac" reverses files before concatenating them. It is, of course, unrelated to "tic" and "toe", which are two commands for working with terminal description files (toe being a rather forced acronym to maintain the joke).

The reason CLI software is considered "hard to use" is not because it requires some kind of unusual talent, but because its normal mode of operation is one that that does not constantly display available options at all times during use. As a result, users of CLI software must use their software frequently enough to keep a list of all operations and the keystrokes to invoke them in their head to gain speed from use of the CLI. Why many authors seem to deliberately choose counterintuitive software names to try to make this task more difficult for a new user is beyond me.

Re:More Open Source Names

[rmm4pi8]

The CLI is for experienced users and scripting. For those purposes, short command names are important, and there are only so many full words that you can make out of 3-4 letters, especially descriptive ones.

New users should hit the K menu to do something, and there all the programs are neatly labeled with full descriptions. Shocking, I know.

Re:More Open Source Names

[Anonymous Coward]

As noted a little while back on the MS CLI as well, intuitive naming conventions in CLI don't really exist. Computers simply do not operate as people are used to live their daily lives. Thus any use of CLI will require major relearning and it really doesn't matter much what the commands are called, as long as they arn't made all to complicated or long. Because they are learning it all from scratch anyway.

Re:More Open Source Names

[serviscope_minor]

Why many authors seem to deliberately choose counterintuitive software names to try to make this task more difficult for a new user is beyond me.

They don't care about the new user. They care about the advanced user and themselves. Bash is a sensible name for a shell for experienced user, since it maintained the convention that shells end with the -sh suffix, and is a nice short name. Tac is another great example. To an experienced user, it is instantly memorable. I've always found touch a rather intuitive name. You [reach out and] touch a file which updates the times, etc without changing its contents.

Yay, but...

[tacocat]

I applaud the work accomplished with KDE.

but....

At this point in time I think that the capability of OpenOffice is a long ways beyond these guys.. Initially I would say, "why bother", but then that's not the Open Source way. There needs to be competition for every software application even if someone like me judges one to be far superior to the competition.

So I applaud the work accomplished.

Re:Yay, but...

[10Ghz]

At this point in time I think that the capability of OpenOffice is a long ways beyond these guys

OO is huge and bloated, and it doesn't integrate well with KDE. So for me OO's capabilities are lacking when compared to Koffice.

Re:Yay, but...

[m50d]

Remember that KOffice started before OOo did. Also, it's far more lightweight. To me it's worth using over OOo.

My Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it run on Windows XP?

Fake emacs?

[colinrichardday]

The members of the Free Software Foundation don't know this, but we've replaced their copies of GNU Emacs with Folger's Crystals Text Editor.

Let's see if they can tell the difference. . .

Alternative to Kexi

[vandan]

Time to pimp my own project: Project: Axis Not Evil

Summary:
Collection of Perl modules providing the same type of solution as Access / Kexi:

- forms
- datasheets
- reports

It's based on Gtk2-Perl, and you use Glade2 to build your interface. I find Gtk2's layout to be far superior to QT.

Of course my solution isn't as integrated as Access / Kexi, but I'm working on that as well ...

Re:Alternative to Kexi

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to spoil your day but...

* I get confused by all the focus on code
* couldn't find a screenshot until I looked really hard
* why is that screenshot referred to as "obligatory"?
* the screenshot appears to be mess of input fields
* the screenshot contains technical terms no one understands.. (I mean: allocate/de-allocate..? what the heck..? even with my technical background I have a hard time understanding what that's supposed to do)

Sorry, but this just ain't it.. :-(

Re:Alternative to Kexi

[vandan]

It's a coders' tool. It's not meant for people like you. Go back to solitaire.

Re:Alternative to Kexi

[hey!]

It's a coders' tool. It's not meant for people like you. Go back to solitaire.

Well, then, I wish you luck, but I don't know exactly whose itch you expect your project to scratch other than your own. Coders don't need another Access/Kexi/OOOrg Base type product. They have got tons of tools that work for them; you'd better do something pretty dang remarkable.

Non-coders don't need tools designed by people who think that the most productive thing they can accomplish on a computer is play solitaire.

Re:Alternative to Kexi

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a coders' tool. It's not meant for people like you. Go back to solitaire.

It may come as a surprise, but I actually do a lot of C++ and Perl coding but that doesn't mean I can't have critics on usability. Coders don't quite need a Access-like tool, they know how to type SQL statements themselves.

Re:Alternative to Kexi

[vandan]

but that doesn't mean I can't have critics on usability

You didn't criticise on usability. You complained you couldn't find a screenshot, and that when you did, you didn't understand what it was.

Coders don't quite need a Access-like tool, they know how to type SQL statements themselves

Get a clue. The coder still types the SQL. I don't provide a query builder like Access does, I simply pass the SQL that the programmer defines to the database server and then populate the fields on their form ... it eliminates manually updating every field on the form, and then manually checking and constructing an SQL command to update the database with changes from the fields. In this respect, I think that programmers certainly do need such a tool.

It may come as a surprise, but I actually do a lot of C++ and Perl coding

You're right. I'm surpised. In fact I'm in a state of disbelief. The fact that your 'criticism' of my project doesn't actually relate to it at all says that you're just an average Joe that went looking for screenshots, decided on what the project was without reading or thinking, and then returned to bitch about your confusion.

How can you claim to be a programmer when your first complain was that you were confused by my extremely simple code examples on the web page?

Coder you are not.

Re:What's the point? Choice!

[KwKSilver]

Choice. Choice is the point. There's really no point in dethroning one tyrannical despot only to replace it with another despot, however benign it may be.
At the moment OO-w does better than K-Write with big (over 250K) WordPerfect documents, which I have to be able to open at home. That may change with K-Office 1.4, & if so I'll be able to choose to use it, instead. Either way, at the moment, I don't have to pollute this box with Windows, just to be able to edit a wpd. Competition is grand!

Closed Source Names

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source has its issues but it isn't even close to having the monopoly on unfortunate names.

Let me list your points that also apply to Closed Source companies, their practices, and products.

* Some names are awkward. Too many acronyms, slashes, dashes, lack of spaces, etc.

* Some names are unfortunately close to unreliable or scary words, such as "Internet Explorer" being ironically one leter different than "Internet Exploder".

* Some names sound amateurish. "iLife" is a good example. So is "Punch!" (a home-design architectural suite).

* Many closed source names are just completely non-descriptive, such as "Pro Tools" (music recording software) or "Nero 6: Ultra Edition" (CD/DVD burning software).

* Versions of software get useless "distinctions" such as "Pro" or "Enterprise" applied which don't really describe anything and don't even really imply an obvious hierarchy. Take Intuit's QuickBooks, for example... Tell me the difference between QuickBooks Basic and QuickBooks Easy Start. Hmm? Or The difference between QuickBooks Premiere and QuickBooks Pro. These are current products.

* Some names are inside jokes

* Some names have mutated into greater inexplicability

* Along the lines of KDE's 'k' and Gnome's 'g', there is the infamous "Apple projects start with 'i'".

* Microsoft seems to enjoy the redundant prefix "My ..." on some folders and the equally redundant suffix "... Files" on others, such as "Program Files". This has been their stubborn standard for too many years.

* Some closed-source companies make their software explicitly have a lower-case first letter, violating normal English capitalization rules. iPod, iTunes, and iLife are good examples of this. Other products violate capitalization mid-word, such as VMware (why the lowercase W?!).

* Some closed-source authors also take delight in difficult-to-say names that are complete nonsense, such as "Elibrium Extendia" (a PC-cleaner competitor to Norton, if that wasn't obvious).

Re:Closed Source Names

[Anonymous Coward]

Nero is actually a good name. The app description for Nero.exe is "Nero burning Rom."

True, it's a bad pun, but it makes a fine name once you see the joke.Your point, however, still applies.

Re:Closed Source Names

[Mornelithe]

So, the name "GIMP" is a travesty, but "Nero" alluding to one of the worst emperors of Rome, and a disaster is a good name?

oh dear

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear associate,

I'm sending this attachment to you with same disregard of whether you can open it or not as you keep sending attached documents to me. This is saved with koffice and I hope you have better luck trying to open it than I did with your .doc-uments because like you, I don't give a fuck I you can't open it.

Sincerely,
AC

what's this got to do with open source?

[rmm4pi8]

1) Yeah, and middle-schoolers still probably laugh about "hard drives" and "floppy drives" too. But, erm, GIMP is a proper noun, not the English word "gimp." So people can get over it.

2) New users will naturally refer to the name of the distribution, most of which are marvelously easy to pronounce.

3-4) If you're confused by this, you're probably not using a CLI mail client. I mean, hello, this is 2005! Also, does "Eudora" just scream email to you? How about "Outlook"?

5) Does "Opera" just scream web-browser to you? Is "Accord" some kind of word for car in your language? Has that hurt Accord sales?

6) Why is this bad?

7) Do they sue you if you capitalize the name by mistake? Do people get confused? If not, then what's the problem?

8) I hear there's this massive commercial website catering mostly to Windows users called news.com.com.

Llama?

[duncanbojangles]

Is that a llama in one of the Krita screenshots?

And have you noticed that programmers seem to be curiously obsessed with certain animals? You know, llamas, badgers (because they run Linux, of course), wombats, grues, dragons (the compiler book). Did O'Reilly start the fad with their books on computers and technology, or are they simply followers?

Joke?

[CarpetShark]

OpenOffice makes KOffice feel lightweight.

I hope you're joking. If you've used KOffice (at least on KDE), you'll know it's much less resource-intensive than OpenOffice.

Re:Joke?

[Hank the Lion]

OpenOffice makes KOffice feel lightweight.
I hope you're joking. If you've used KOffice (at least on KDE), you'll know it's much less resource-intensive than OpenOffice.

Yes, that is what he said.
If you feel the same way, why do you hope he is joking?

For me, Krita wins.

[CarpetShark]

Yeah, the names aren't great. "Gimp" is actually offensive. I'm getting used to Krita, though :)

But that's not very important. What matters to me is that I've been waiting on Krita for over a year now, so I can finally ditch Gimp and use a modern app with media support and lots of potential, that fits the rest of my desktop :)

Knoda

[CarpetShark]

Try knoda; it does stuff right now that kexi is only planning :)

Not toolkit, design

[CarpetShark]

I really like Krita so far. I agree that the interface elements are too big for my 1024x768 laptop screen.

However, it's not a problem with the toolkit or the theme: it's simply a matter of poor screen real-estate usage. If they would just make everything dock into one side panel, it'd be fine.

Re:Not toolkit, design

[vurian]

It's not "they" who would do this -- it's me... Anyway, the all elements in one panel was the situation when I took up maintainership, and it proved to be limiting. Not extensible, and not configurable by the user. Besides, it took up just a much space as the current configuration: about 200 pixels width and the whole window's height. The next version of Krita will allow users to drag the tabs inside the dockers to other dockers, meaning that if you want to have everything in one window, you can do that. Boudewijn Rempt

Re:Not toolkit, design

[CarpetShark]

Just to clarify: are you saying that I'll be able to move all dockable panels into one area, with tabs? That's exactly what I think would help :) At the moment, I'm forced to have two side panels, where one only contains a single 1/3 height item, which seems like a massive waste of space on my small screen.

If you're having trouble fitting it all in, could I suggest looking at how 3D apps like 3D Studio Max do it? They're VERY full apps: highly extensible through plugins that add to the panels directly, yet they don't get overcrowded, due to a few great principles.

Basically, they use dockable tabls with headed subpanels. When you click a heading, the subpanel collapses, but the whole tab contents are scrollable anyway, so you can have as many open as you want, and just scroll the area up and down. If you're looking for an extensible interface, that's the best approach I've ever seen.

Anyway, congratulations on finally getting Krita out there; I know it's been a long road, and I'm very glad to have it available at last :) Hopefully we'll see start to see an explosion of plugins developed by third parties now too :)

Re:Not toolkit, design

[vurian]

Yes, that's right, that's what I'm working on. You did notice that you can alread collapse docked panels, did you?

KWord support for ODT: I'm not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Open a new KWord file, insert a text frame, enter something into the frame. Save the document in ODT format. Open it with OO Writer.
Now, do the same thing vice versa.
This sucks.

Where do i get my numbers?

[nurb432]

Simple. From being in the business for 30 + years.

Re:Krap

[m50d]

It's only one letter extra, and it helps you know what libraries you mean. I wouldn't go looking for a photo app, look for a photo app and then see what you need for it, if it starts with K you know it's kde wheras if it's just called PhotoEdit how would you know?

And if you want a kde app for something, just search for that thing on kde-apps.org.

Is 100% compatibility really what we want?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Having OpenOffice render opened word documents differently from Word, is a problem

The problem is that as long as this attitude prevails, OpenOffice Writer will never overtake Word, because it can't do anything Word can't.

I don't know why importing data from one application into another is expected to be a lossless process. That's just unrealistic if the two aren't clones in their feature sets, and is that really desirable? I'd say what matters is that you can get the data across in a form that resembles the original enough to be useful.

For example, Word has pretty poor support for fine typography. Are we really saying that an OSS word processor can't (for example) support proper ligatures and "expert" characters from OpenType fonts, typographical enhancements like hanging punctuation, or more advanced page layout like a decent line-breaking algorithm for fully justified paragraphs and stretchable whitespace? Serious DTP and typesetting packages like InDesign or TeX do these things all the time, and get much nicer-looking output as a result.

But of course, if you used TeX's line-breaking algorithm for your justified paragraphs, while Word used the crude algorithm it has at present, then importing a Word document into your alternative software wouldn't exactly duplicate the page layout. It's somewhere between chicken-and-egg and catch-22...

Re:Is 100% compatibility really what we want?

[julesh]

For example, Word has pretty poor support for fine typography. Are we really saying that an OSS word processor can't (for example) support proper ligatures and "expert" characters from OpenType fonts, typographical enhancements like hanging punctuation, or more advanced page layout like a decent line-breaking algorithm for fully justified paragraphs and stretchable whitespace?

Of course it can. But these features should be switched off when you open a Word document, and not switched on again unless the user specifically asks for them.

Re:Is 100% compatibility really what we want?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But these features should be switched off when you open a Word document, and not switched on again unless the user specifically asks for them.

So every word processor on the planet has to not only implement, but also adaptively default to and provide an interface to select between, the line-breaking algorithms used by every other word processing product whose data can be imported? Even if there is a far superior native algorithm? And this is purely to replicate the poor typography of the original software's rendering of the document? I'm not sure that's even viable in a market with more than two or three players, and I'm certainly not convinced it's desirable just to avoid a very occasional layout change...

Re:Is 100% compatibility really what we want?

[julesh]

So every word processor on the planet has to not only implement, but also adaptively default to and provide an interface to select between, the line-breaking algorithms used by every other word processing product whose data can be imported?

No, that's a reducto ad absurdum argument. As long as there is a single de-facto standard for such things, everything should make as much effort as is reaosnable to support it. I'd put the threshold at about 80% market share -- once a word processor drops below that point, there's no longer a need to be layout-for-layout compatible with its document formats. Until that time, there is.

I'm certainly not convinced it's desirable just to avoid a very occasional layout change.

The changes aren't just occasional. I've been working with OO.o receiving documents from clients written with MS Word for about 2 years now, and about 10% of the documents render with noteable differences under OO.o. And these differences frequently matter to my clients.

The most jarring changes I've seen are with page-anchored floating objects, which frequently seem to appear in completely incorrect places. I'm not sure if this is an OO.o bug, or simply because it is impossible to import MS Word documents that well without duplicating MS Word's formatting options.

One thing I will note is that the simple typographical features you talk about (line breaking, kerning, etc.) should probably not have an MS-imitation mode applied. This is because there is substantial variation even between different versions of Word, and Word will even display documents differently if you change your printer driver sometimes. If Word can't standardise itself well enough for this to work, obviously nothing else can hope to duplicate it.

But other word processors should be able to emulate Word's box model, including precise details of how spacing affects paragraph positioning, etc.

Gimp brushes support

[tod_miller]

WHat I like is, it doesn't have the floaty noise of the gimp toolbars, everything is locked down.

Who said having vague floating windows is a good idea?

Give me one damn window, and something to do inside it, not everything all slapdash.

Luckily I even use kayboard shortcuts for as much as possible.

KOffice is rather different from OO

[Budenny]

I've only looked closely at the WP and Database components. People are underestimating the WP component, perhaps because it is so different from OO. It is frame oriented. I don't know about stability, but if it is stable, it will be quite a lot easier both to publish with, and to use as a long document outliner, manage sections and styles and so on. It isn't a Word replacement, this is a different animal. Its a combined outliner and desktop publisher. Lyx is the other alternative in this kind of thing, but its a very steep learning curve. On the Database, the problem is documentation. There basically doesn't seem to be any. The end user, for whom it seems to be designed, is going to need some. It looks the part in terms of design, but when you read it is meant to compete with Filemaker, you expect real point and click configuration. I know Filemaker is usually despised by real coders, but the fact is, a non-programmer can construct a simple database application that looks pretty and works and will accomodate quite big files. I am not sure that Kexi will meet this need. For example - compare stating how many characters a field will accomodate, with the way you make field scrolling in FM. From an end user point of view, there is a world of difference.

Another example - how does one use scripts? FM has what everyone will feel is that really childish point and click script writer. But it works!

Conclusion: higher marks for Writer, but probably lower for Kexi, than most people rate.