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?

[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.

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

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: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

[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

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.

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.

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".

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.