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

[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

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?

[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?

[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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[marcello_dl]

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

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?

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[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!

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

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.

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

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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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.

more screenshots

[Karma Sucks]

On OSDir.com.

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: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.

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

[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: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..

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".

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.

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.

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