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

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).

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: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.

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: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

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: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: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: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.