KOffice 1.5 Released

ingwa writes to tell us that the KOffice team has released version 1.5 which offers, among other things, default OpenDocument file format, new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. From the announcement: "KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument."

Comments

KPlato

[Svenne]

I bet that's klingon for something.

K'Platoh!

Re:KPlato

[TClevenger]

I think Plato sounds better in the original Klingon.

Re:KPlato

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all about the analogy of the kave in Kplato's republik.

Re:KPlato

[Arandir]

KPlato Barada Nikto!

Re:KPlato

[Anonymous Coward]

K'Platoh vIneH

Re:KPlato

[urbanRealist]

For the lazy among you, the phrase "Klaatu barada nikto" originates from the 1951 Cold-War-era science fiction film The Day The Earth Stood Still. The phrase "Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!" was used to stop Gort, the robot in the film, from destroying the world, etc..

Re:KPlato

[fritzk3]

I think KPlato was that KChick on KDifferent KStrokes. KShame, though, now she's KDead.

Re:KPlato

[daeley]

In Tron, on the wall of Alan's (Bruce Boxleitner) cubicle, there is a sign that says "Gort Klaatu barada nikto."

Re:KPlato

[Sigg3.net]

K'Platoh, interj.
Traditional Klingon greeting used when one encounters a dear friend that just stepped on a small, furry creature.

Re:Stop trying

[butterwise]

Thanks, Bill...

OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[PurpleMonkeyKing]

This is great news. More choices is always better. This might even convince a few people to use KOffice as their Office Suite of choice, as it is native to KDE, and it'll be easier than ever to share documents with others.

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[runningduck]

What I find odd is that KOffice now uses ODF which is native to OpenOffice.org. But according to the KOffice 1.5 import/export filters the support for the format is not quite there yet. http://www.koffice.org/filters/1.5/

OpenOffice Writer Import: The filter generally works well, however some features might be missing or might not work correctly yet.

OpenOffice Writer Export: The filter generally works although it is not finished, and it may suffer from some instability.

This certianly raises some questions.

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[timeOday]

In addition to OpenDocument, OpenOffice still supports its previous native document format, sxw. Perhaps the "filters" page refers to sxw compatibility?

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see anything special in me too technology. Surely K-Office can try to differentiate by doing things such as building in collaboration tools, integrating into online/wiki type tools, building these functions into web services, etc..

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesnt .doc already do that?

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[archen]

Keep in mind that ODF is a spec not a law. By supporting ODF you are not required to support all features the format is capable of. Simplistic example: I create a text reader for blind people, I can probably ignore 80% of the ODF spec and be compliant in reading (and writing) it for my needs. I'm sure Open Office will support everything including the kitchen sink, while Koffice will support mostly a subset of that - so I would expect some features may be missing. ODF is also pretty flexible so it can support stuff we haven't even thought of yet.

I've moved away from Open Office because of the bloat, so if Koffice skips some of the more obscure parts of the format that Open Office supports, that's okay by me.

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[NereusRen]

OpenOffice format is different from OpenDocument format (confusing, I know). I presume the filter on that page refers to the old-style OpenOffice formats which used extensions like .sxw, .sxc, etc. The new OpenDocument format, which OpenOffice has now switched to, uses extensions like .odt, .ods, etc.

Since KOffice saves in OpenDocument format by default now, I would guess they don't list it as an "import/export filter."

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[Eil]

Although both KOffice and OpenOffice use the same (open) document format, they're not quite compatible.

Example: Recently, I installed KOffice on my low-end laptop because it's much faster to load and use than OpenOffice. It may not have all the bells and whistles of OO, but it quite gets the job done 95% of the time. I thought everything would be great since they can both open and save ODFs, an open standard, by the way.

I drafted a document in OpenOffice containing a few paragraphs of text and one simple table. It opened just fine in KOffice. Made some changes, opened it again in OpenOffice which claimed that the document was corrupt and displayed a bunch of garage. The only way I could get it back into OpenOffice's dialect of ODF was to save it as a freaking Microsoft Word document in KOffice and then open and save it again in OpenOffice. I was able to repeat this about 50% of the time and found no clue as to what might have been causing the corruption.

As we've seen so many times before in the computing industry, agreeing on a standard is one thing, agreeing on an implementation of a standard is quite another.

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[ingwa]

This sounds more like a bug to me. Two questioins:

1. Was this KWord 1.5 or an earlier version? 1.5 has had many fixes for OpenDocument and might very well work if you used an older version in your example.

2. If it WAS 1.5, could you report the bug to bugs.kde.org? If possible, attach the document, as this will make it easier for us to fix the bug.

Last, but not least, don't forget that OpenOffice.org does also contain bugs.

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[zander]

I'm sure Open Office will support everything including the kitchen sink, while Koffice will support mostly a subset of that

There are various little things that KWord does support that OOo does not (yet) support. The ODF standard was created by both office suits and KOffice people did request features like Frames and some numbering-types , as a fast example, that made it into the spec but that OOo still does not support. I'm sure there is more.

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[richlv]

it is already mentioned, but please - submit this as a bugreport to both kde and openoffice.org bug trackers.

koffice should not save files that oo.org is unable to open, but oo.org should be able to open files that koffice can. let the developers figure the best solution for this problem (hopefully without pointing fingers & flamefights ;) )

Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!

[Eil]

1. Was this KWord 1.5 or an earlier version? 1.5 has had many fixes for OpenDocument and might very well work if you used an older version in your example.

It was an earlier version. I intend to try KOffice 1.5 once it's in Gentoo's portage.

2. If it WAS 1.5, could you report the bug to bugs.kde.org? If possible, attach the document, as this will make it easier for us to fix the bug.

I'll do so if I discover it again. I didn't have the time before to submit a bug report, but now that I'm trying to be more active in submitting Gentoo bugs, I'd be happy to share what I find with developers.

ko or ooo?

[urbieta]

Im running ooo in windows, now that ko is compatible with ooo, can I run it in here? :D

Re:ko or ooo?

[ingwa]

You will when KO 2.0 comes out around new year 2007 or soon thereafter. KOffice 2.0 will run natively on Unix, Windows and MacOS X. The reason I can promise that is that kdelibs and Qt4 already are ported to and GPL:ed on those platforms.

Re:ko or ooo?

[javacowboy]

KOffice 2.0 will run natively on Unix, Windows and MacOS X...

Do you have a link that mentions OS X specifically?

By "native" do you mean through X11, or built with Cocao and running natively on Apple's proprietary Aqua GUI?

I'm not accusing you of anything, I just want clarification. Given the sorry state of free/open office suites on Mac right now, I would LOVE to run KOffice natively on OS X, if that will become possible.

Re:ko or ooo?

[gnud]

Natively, through QT4. No X server, but not on Aqua.

Re:ko or ooo?

[Dr_LHA]

Actually it will be Aqua, as Aqua is just the name of the Mac OS X interface.

You probably mean Carbon or Cocoa. QT on Mac is essentially another UI library, like Cocoa, Carbon and some others are (Adobe's libraries for example), which all run on Aqua.

Re:ko or ooo?

[Anonymous Coward]

9 months seems like an awfully short time for such a major porting effort. Especially considering that office apps tend to stretch the limits of normal UI toolkits.

Re:ko or ooo?

[dalutong]

For those who are wondering about Mac OS X and how it will look -- http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/mac.html

Re:ko or ooo?

[ThePhilips]

QT4 uses Carbon. Carbon sucks => QT sucks on Mac OS X *very* much (*). Much much more than it does on Wind0ze. It's probably my picky eyes - normally I can tell GUI toolkit used just in few mouse clicks the app screen.

You can check Overnet client for example of QT/Carbon Mac OS application. It looks like Cocoa. But when you try to use it... Well, the fact that it's not part of Mac OS X is just creeping out of every piece of its GUI. (Clipboard, drag'n'drop, file names, etc.)

PS I have to use OOo on Windows quite much. OOo1 is quite usable. OOo2 - broke/killed every feature we liked in OOo - so its adoption was put in long box. Can't wait for KO being ported to Windows - it's so much much much much cleaner compared to bloat and wierdness of OOo. QT on Windows is pretty usable.

(*) Just recalled. There are hints that QT in future will support Cocoa. Our GUI developers say so - and they communicate with Trolltech constantly. As well there are rumours that Apple will abandon Carbon support.

Re:ko or ooo?

[richlv]

broke/killed every feature we liked in OOo

really ? could you list at least some of them ?

Re:ko or ooo?

[ThePhilips]

Internationalization doesn't work. In 2.0 you had no choice of language for auto spell check at *all*. IIRC, 2.0.1/2 fixed that.

Instalation of additional dictionaries in 2.0/2.0.1 was borken. People say that 2.0.2 fixed that - but nobody in our company managed to make it working. (Yes, we updated that magic document for downloading dictionaries. No, it didn't help.)

Also, GUI became even more bloated compared to one in OOo1. Before it looks weird - but was practical. Now it looks nice - but very distracting and at times annoying.

For me - touch-typist - OOo1 works better. OOo2 does some redundant redraws on screen while typing. Especially in on-line view (normal mode in WinWord terms). Needless to say page view is even worse - it's quite hard to type when pages jump on screen.

In the end, I still use VIM to prepare large chunks of documentation and only then paste them into OOo. It's sort'a good compromise: VIM is good text editor but can't formatting while OOo isn't good as text editor but can format text. Also, I can check-in the raw text files into SVN/CVS - and have version history for all modifications. Thou, since final document has no relation to raw text file, the revision history become obsolete quite fast.

Re:ko or ooo?

[richlv]

Internationalization doesn't work. In 2.0 you had no choice of language for auto spell check at *all*. IIRC, 2.0.1/2 fixed that.

strange. i've been using all kinds of development versions, never stumbled upon this. if i's fixed, then you probably can strike it out from your list :)

Instalation of additional dictionaries in 2.0/2.0.1 was borken. People say that 2.0.2 fixed that - but nobody in our company managed to make it working. (Yes, we updated that magic document for downloading dictionaries. No, it didn't help.)

ahh, i usually add dictionaries by editing dictionary.lst manually. maybe that could help you. you could also write a simple script to install the dioctionary (it would be two or three lines in bash :) )

Also, GUI became even more bloated compared to one in OOo1. Before it looks weird - but was practical. Now it looks nice - but very distracting and at times annoying.

if you have specific complaints, try filing an issue. that might be a bug or an oversight.

For me - touch-typist - OOo1 works better. OOo2 does some redundant redraws on screen while typing. Especially in on-line view (normal mode in WinWord terms). Needless to say page view is even worse - it's quite hard to type when pages jump on screen.

i don't think they are intentional - i have reported a couple of unnecessary redraws (mostly about picture handling and such) - most are fixed already, some are accepted.
if you can reliably reproduce them, report.

In the end, I still use VIM to prepare large chunks of documentation and only then paste them into OOo.

ahh :D
vim. ok, that probably works for simple text input. if redundant redraws is your biggest problem you probably could use oo.org once they are fixed, but...

Also, I can check-in the raw text files into SVN/CVS - and have version history for all modifications. ...this is veeery nice. i have just recently set up a testing svn instance - and i like it a lot :)
i like it so much i am trying to think of ways to use it for myself ;)
i am not coder, so the best thing i have found are some large scripts.
there are some talks about possibility to keep odf documents in svn, but i don't think that's possible right now without some extensive hacking.

Thou, since final document has no relation to raw text file, the revision history become obsolete quite fast.

i've though about automated process that would decompress the contents and feed them to svn - but most of the changes would be incomprehensible (formatting, some non-plaintext content etc).

feeding only contents, maybe ? posible, but that would lose all the formatting changes, which can be important...

i'll probably leave it for more experienced people ;)
a detailed change history probably anyway requires a good oo.org support.

Re:ko or ooo?

[Axoiv]

Wow, KDE is really going to expand their user-base. That's for sure.

Mixed Bag

[nursegirl]

I'm very excited about Kexi. We've needed an open standards equivalent to Access/Filemaker Pro for businesses who want something small and don't want to hire a database programmer for MySQL or something. Not so excited about KPlato. Most project management software is inherently broken - not in terms of the technology, but in terms of the essential vocabulary of projects and project management. It's one of those times that I wish the Linux world felt more comfortable about innovating. Thank goodness there's basecamp, at least.

Re:Mixed Bag

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use similar programs, why don't you make suggestions on what you would expect them to have? I'm sure the KPlato team would love to hear what actual users would like their program to do. You do have a say. If you need more or more flexible functionality, try to explain to the team what you want. Innovation is not generated in a vacuum. Necessity is the mother of invention. In the cases where the one feeling the need and the one having the tools to fulfill it are different people, then they need to communicate otherwise the need will never be fulfilled.

(a.k.a where's the patch?)

Re:Mixed Bag

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about the KPlato developers, but the Krita guys don't seem to give a fuck what users want. They're kind of like the gimp kids that way, only gimp is years ahead and has worse file dialogs that make it pretty unusable all by themselves.

Re:Stop trying

[Wootzor von Leetenha]

It supports OpenDocument though, and that's the point of OpenDocument, that multiple programs are instantly compatible if they support the format. You need multiple programs in order for this to be true ;) Although, if it isn't better than OOo, you have to question its existence, which I agree with you on.

Congrats...

[Ecko7889]

Congrats on the release, but I have to say that OO.o still is the leader in OSS office suites.

ODF has pushed a long way since I first heard about it, but without support from the industry, their will be no pressure against Microsoft to implement it into MSOffice.

Hopefully Google and Writely will tip the edge toward ODF.

Re:Congrats...

[Ostsol]

I found myself really disappointed by OO.o -- at least the Windows version. For all its faults, I found MS Office cleaner and much more responsive. Basically: as far as Windows office products go, I'm shafted.

Re:Congrats...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wordperfect is said to be going to use ODF too. But they are a propriety software company, and you know how long it takes such to develop. Apparently, OSS is faster in development than private business. :P

Re:Congrats...

[Anonymous Coward]

OO remains butt ugly, just like all GTK apps. Honestly, what's with all the muted greys and Windows 98 looking icons. How can they expect it to compete with modern office suites when it still looks 10 years old? Same could be said for Gnome, actually...

Re:Congrats...

[Ecko7889]

You bring up a very good point. MSOffice may be a very good product in your eyes, but you have to take into the cost effectiveness of OO.o vs. MSOffice. MSOffice retails for around $200 dollars, and is developed by a large scale company. The calibar at which OO.o is developed just displays the advantages of OO.o.

If you do not transition between OO.o and MSOffice, there are no significant problems, but why should we have to adjust our open standards to meet the needs of a closed standard product. Things are so much simplier when you remove MS from the picture entirely.

Another point to note is that OO.o is under no release restrictions. MSOffice requires commericial distrobution, usually once a year release.

Re:Congrats...

[Kjella]

Congrats on the release, but I have to say that OO.o still is the leader in OSS office suites.

Well, as long as they're properly compatible - pick the one that suits your personal preference. Or even the right tool for the right task, if one does something well that the other doesn't (or not at all). I'm perfectly happy that Firefox is more popular than Opera (my preference), because if you've built a site to work in one it's 99% sure to work in the other.

If we see competition on features rather than on format and compatibility, nothing is better than that in my opinion. If it isn't clear what I mean by that, let's for the moment assume that one of them offered regex search & replace, and the other did not. The results, before and after are both valid ODF documents - the difference is how you get there. Same with layout, which offers good layout management? Spell check and grammar?

Besides, I think the only way to have a format implemented according to spec is to have at least two implementations. They're sure to run into many of the other's bugs resulting in better standards compliance to benefit all. In short, I don't care if OpenOffice is "leading", I think "local competition" is just as excellent as motivator as the big competition against MS Office.

Re:Congrats...

[Ecko7889]

Does anestetics apply to the final product? How does eye candy improve your productivity?

I believe OO.o does a fine job of adhereing to proper anestetics. Just because there are no shiny rollovers or fading of menus, doesn't mean the product doesn't complete it's purpose properly.

Re:Congrats...

[afd8856]

Gnome is quite pretty, you just need to spend some time customizing it. There's a ton of themes with new window borders, controls and icons to explore, and most of them will get you a really nice desktop to work with.

Re:Congrats...

[cozziewozzie]

Well, to be completely honest, OpenOffice is also developed by a very large software company: Sun Microsystems.

They have many full-time programmers working on it (about 40-50, if I'm not mistaken) and they are doing most of the work.

Sure, openness is good and we have many really cool things as a result of this -- see KDE integration for a very important example -- but Oo.org is hardly the shining example of hobbyists coming together to build a great product.

Actually, KOffice is a far better example for this.

Re:Congrats...

[Kadin2048]

Pity there's no functional screen-top, context sensitive menubar, though.

Right now I'm using Kubuntu and it's not exactly the world's most stable piece of software; I'd like to use Gnome, but they insist on using Windows-style menubars for everything. It's a crummy design[1] and I don't understand the resistance to having alternatives like KDE does.

[1] If you like it, more power to you; I think they suck and just want a choice, I don't care if you use it or not. The only good argument I've heard in favor of window-top menubars is that they're easier to use with multiple monitors, but really I think Linux could outdo MacOS in this respect and have an application's menubar jump to the top of the screen on which it was located, if people were bothered by this.

Re:Congrats...

[psxman]

The word you're looking for is "aesthetic". An "anaesthetic" is something you take before you have surgery to numb the body parts that would feel pain.

Re:Congrats...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. Word offers nothing like the navigator which allows you to go easilty to all your headgins/sections/images/tables/notes/whatever. If there is an equivalent is so well hidden as to be useless. It is a must to manage large documents. As well as the "Master Document" concept which I do not think exists in word (or is also very well hidden). Anchoring images in Word is a pain, it's in 3 dialogs deep worth of crap. The menus are generally much much more intuitive, and OO.o has done a great job of using the context menu. That' s what it was meant for... not to keep flying off to the main menu. The only thing useability wise that MS has int its favour as far as the word processor is involved is that many people have used it before and are familiar with the interface. It is a crummy interface.

And styles are a pain to use in Word. Again, styles are a must if you're seriously writing large documents, such as books or theses. It is also very convenient in writing journal papers.

A thesis, from which you want to extract papers from your chapters. All you have to do is cut and paste in another document with the same style names but formatted according to the Paper's standards, and nothing more. It can be done in Word, but it's such a pain as to be useless. And I'm not even talking about the handling of images which is much, much smoother in OO.o.

One last point but one that is important when writing a thesis or technical papers in scientific and engineering fields, the equation editor in Word SUCKS BIG TIME. OO.o equation editor has merged the best concepts from Word Perfect 5.1 and MS editors into a great little editor. Not as good as LaTex for rendering, but one can hope it will improve. But when you have tens of equations to write, it beats MS Word hands down.

Re:Congrats...

[gnugnugnu]

> OO remains butt ugly, just like all GTK apps

nice try troll but openoffice is not a GTK app

Re:Congrats...

[generic-man]

Try Word's outline view to navigate through sections. You can also navigate by various things (next section, page, etc) by clicking the dot near the bottom of the vertical scroll bar and using the double-up and double-down arrows on that same scroll bar.

I typed "Master Document" into the "Type a question" box and found a wealth of information about them.

What is so awful about using styles? They have a big pane on the side in Word 2002 and they've had a dropdown in the Formatting toolbar since around Word 6. You can even assign a shortcut key to any style for quick access.

Re:Congrats...

[christurkel]

KWord is an excellent FrameMaker replacement...OO.o isn't.

Re:Congrats...

[kimvette]

Notice the troll used AC. Figures.

Re:Congrats...

[big tex]

As for styles, Word has them, but they don't work well, IMO. (yes, the sidebar helps a lot.)

Example: I write more technical-type documents instead of prose. That is, with headers, lists, bullet points, stuff that should summarize into a table of contents nicely.
If I am typing along and want to insert a list, I can hit either the button on the toolbar or select the style that's something like 'Normal, Numbered.' All of a sudden, the entire damn document gets numbered, not just creating an indented 1) where the cursor is. If i hit CRTL-Z, it then behaves normally. Does this every time on any of the computers over the last five years or so. The style functions are borked so badly that I actually write all of my big reports in OO.o.

Very frustrating, and is my most occurring 'I hate Microsoft' moment.

Re:Congrats...

[Anonymous Coward]

> The calibar at which OO.o is developed just displays the advantages of OO.o.

No it doesn't. It's quite nice for a free office suite, and I'm sure that MS can throw more resources at optimizing, but in the end, one has little to do with the other. You haven't actually addressed the actual issue the person brought up, so it looks like you're making excuses. OOO is a fine piece of software that isn't perfect, but doesn't need excuses.

I personally don't find OOO very slow to run on windows, though I must say Office certainly starts up faster (don't start with the preloading myth, Office hasn't done that since 95). I find OOO's margin/border displays a bit "noisy" for just viewing docs, but actually more informative than word's when I'm using negative margins for example.

Re:Congrats...

[eldepeche]

Looking at OOo makes me feel like I'm being stabbed in the eyes. That doesn't sound very productive.

Re:Congrats...

[Fred_A]

An "anaesthetic" is something you take before you have surgery to numb the body parts that would feel pain.

Yes, that's what he said : "get an anaesthetic before using MS windows".

Re:Congrats...

[jbolden]

IMHO one of the biggest OS/2 made was having their default look good to color blind men (happened between 2.0 final release candidate and 2.0). OS/2 was far and away the nicest looking destkop anyone had: 3d effect on the icons, color coded folders, reasonable dragging, mouse contexts... But the default install was bland and boring. It looked not much better than Windows 3.1 and worse than 95.

Re:Congrats...

[moro_666]

4 people in a row can't spell Kongratz ....

anyway, i agree, openoffice certainly is more ready for the primetime. but as for integration with the rest of the system, all the kde goodies (or should i spell it koodies?) are better.

kotta ko to sleep now...

(and tomorrow Koogle will take over the world, muhahahaaa)

Re:Congrats...

[10Ghz]

"An "anaesthetic" is something you take before you have surgery to numb the body parts that would feel pain."

Sometimes I feel that anaesthetics is exactly what is needed when using OpenOffice....

Re:Congrats...

[kv9]

Looking at OOo makes me feel like I'm being stabbed in the eyes. That doesn't sound very productive.

it is pretty productive, if your job is to get stabbed in the eyes.

Re:Congrats...

[EvanED]

I can name a number of features I use on a regular basis on Word that are missing from or vastly inferior in OO.o too.

For instance, Word has page view, normal view, outline view, and web view. I like to write in normal view. OO.o doesn't have it. The next-best thing usually in Word is page view with the top and bottom margins collapsed; OO.o doesn't have it. The navigator in OO.o provides some of the usefulness of the outline view in Word, and each lacks benefits of the other.

The track changes feature works a lot better in Word (at least starting with 2002). In OO.o deleting text while recording changes acts like Word 97 and before; it turns the deleted text red and strikethrough. Word 2002 and higher pulls the deleted text out of the body and puts it in a marginal note. In addition to looking nicer and being more readable, this avoids the disruption in format that the former approach causes in where the text flows. (I don't know what approach 2000 takes.)

Or what about a grammar checker? Something else OO.o lacks entirely. (And yes, I know Word's has problems, but at least for me it does a lot more good than harm.)

As well as the "Master Document" concept which I do not think exists in word (or is also very well hidden).

Has been present since at least version 6.0. I've used a master document running Windows 3.1 on a 386.

Anchoring images in Word is a pain, it's in 3 dialogs deep worth of crap.

Perhaps you could explain what you mean by this. I can't even see how you can get 3 dialogs deep in something related to images. Which doesn't mean that you can't, just that you're not looking in the right place. (This is in 2002.)

The menus are generally much much more intuitive

And yet a fairly common dialog, page setup, moves to Format -> Page. Sure, if you think about it, it fits better there. However, that argument loses its validity when you take into consideration that almost every other program, at least under Windows,* puts it at file->page setup.

* This is an exageration, and I don't want to hear "so-and-so put it in the Window menu!" My point is that it's an established standard that page setup goes in File, and breaking that caused at least me much headache when I was looking for how to set margins.

OO.o has done a great job of using the context menu

Examples?

Actually in my experimentation just now I found one place where OO.o is sorely lacking: right clicking on an edit when using track changes doesn't give you an option to accept or reject.

One last point but one that is important when writing a thesis or technical papers in scientific and engineering fields, the equation editor in Word SUCKS BIG TIME

Agreed. Though I posit that if you're doing that much in equations you shouldn't be using EITHER editor and should drop to your favorite TeX variant.

Actually I posit that if you're doing almost any document you want to look good you should drop to LaTeX, because there are a lot of subtle (e.g. ligatures; compare "fi" in Word or OO.o to "fi" in TeX output) and not-so-subtle things (better line break allocation) that it does while typesetting that make its output, IMO, *MUCH* nicer than a word processor.

It takes a bit to learn, but it's well worth it, and if you're working on either a book or thesis the time spent learning will be insignificant in the total amount worked. In fact, it may save you time long-term.

Re:Congrats...

[yuri benjamin]

If creating structured documents is your thing, check out LyX.

Re:Congrats...

[zander]

What you say sounds very weird and certainly is not what happens for me. Did you take a look at the docs, the forums or even asked the user lists?

Please don't just dismiss KWord like that; the styles support actually has been used to markup really big and professional documents, so it can't be all bad :)

Re:Congrats...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you blind?! It's Microsoft Word, not KWord.

If you've ever used winword, you know how badly it auto-numerates EVERYTHING. It's rather headache-inducing.

Re:Congrats...

[richlv]

ah, i just feel like commenting ;)

For instance, Word has page view, normal view, outline view, and web view.

have never really liked this one, somehow oo.org approach is good for me

The track changes feature works a lot better in Word (at least starting with 2002).

agreed. there is an issue, so you might want to vote on it :)
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=23 465

Or what about a grammar checker? Something else OO.o lacks entirely.

never wanted this. though i think there was some development of grammar checker for english, i'm sure it will be long time before something usable for latvian language appears ;)

Has been present since at least version 6.0. I've used a master document running Windows 3.1 on a 386.

i haven't used master document extensively, but i've heard from people who have written long pieces that msoffice master documents are awful and oo.org ones beat them on sight, both in oo.org mailing lists and other resources that compare oo.org to mso.
and then there's this :
http://addbalance.com/word/masterdocuments.htm
"there are two kinds of Master Documents: Those that are corrupt and those that will be corrupt soon."

this might be improved in recent versions, but after such a history i really would avoid using them. thankfully, not so in oo.org ;)

> Anchoring images in Word is a pain, it's in 3 dialogs deep worth of crap.
Perhaps you could explain what you mean by this.

i don't know about anchoring, but a friend of mine was trying to lay out a relatively simple two page document with logos, some background images, frames etc. he was cursing like hell after trying to do it in msword for two days (that was a requirement for the result). i suggested oo.org (1.1-something at that time). after 5 minutes he had done everything he wanted (he was using oo.org for the first time and had used msoffice for a lot of years). as i understood, it was about unability to set absolute position without ugly hacks, pictures jumping around and general unability to position objects reliably.

that was msoffice 2002, i think.

And yet a fairly common dialog, page setup, moves to Format -> Page. Sure, if you think about it, it fits better there. However, that argument loses its validity when you take into consideration that almost every other program, at least under Windows,* puts it at file->page setup.

when i first tried oo.org, i was unable to find page setup in file menu. after blinking for five seconds, i looked in format menu. so far i have given/set up oo.org for a lot of people. 3 or four have asked me "where is page setup ?" - i told them "now, think about what you want to do." - "ahh, found it". took 15 seconds at most for less computer savvy person. that seriously is an improvenment.

Actually in my experimentation just now I found one place where OO.o is sorely lacking: right clicking on an edit when using track changes doesn't give you an option to accept or reject.

unfortunately, a very longstanding feature request...
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=61 91

comparing with word, oo.org is lacking one more thing i would like to have - rectangular block selection.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=15 96
that's one awfully old feature request.

now, i could go on about oo.org features that word either lacks or they suck (pdf output, page styles (!), styles as such (they are much better implemented in oo.org), cross-platform, odf (integrating with document management or any other system is so goddam

Re:Congrats...

[richlv]

you can configure gnome ?!?!?!?!??/!~~!!??
omg. omg. *runs in circles*
where will this lead ? what is happening to this world ?

Re:Congrats...

[EvanED]

Thanks for the issue links!

I have a few votes in place now. ;-)

never wanted this. though i think there was some development of grammar checker for english

I like it because it catches typos I make and I can tell when it's full of crap.

when i first tried oo.org, i was unable to find page setup in file menu. after blinking for five seconds, i looked in format menu. so far i have given/set up oo.org for a lot of people. 3 or four have asked me "where is page setup ?" - i told them "now, think about what you want to do." - "ahh, found it". took 15 seconds at most for less computer savvy person. that seriously is an improvenment.

Yes, it takes 15 seconds to find it. (I suspect that's an exaggeration for someone who doesn't have someone else there. I know at least I started going through menus just reading every option. I'd guess that'd take 30 seconds.)

But then it takes another 15 seconds to find the track changes feature. Maybe another 15 seconds to figure out how to add a header or footer (depending on what version of Word you're coming from). And another 15 seconds to figure out how to insert the page number.

It's the "and another 15 seconds" that make it so that people don't change software. You have to have pretty compelling features in order to overcome the momentum of knowing how to use software. Right now, the biggest thing OO.o has going for it over Office is price. And that's not big for a lot of people who get it for free legally, pirate it, or get it with their computer. (E.g. I have it for free thanks to a university site license.)

pdf output

That's not hard to overcome though... you can add a 3rd party PDF output tool. It's more complicated, but I'd have it anyway for other programs. It's more flexible too.

page styles (!), styles as such (they are much better implemented in oo.org)

I don't know my way around styles much, especially in OO.o; can you explain how it's better?

cross-platform

Office is probably the worse MS software to use as an example of this actually. The MacOS version works at least okay, and Word is one of the main objects of Wine, and my understanding is that it runs well under CrossOver Office. The Linux situation is FAR inferior to OO.o, but it's not hopless either.

(Personally I use OO.o in Linux and Office in Windows. OO.o is good enough it's no where close to worth it trying to get Wine or CrossOver Office running.)

Oh, and isn't the Mac build not native, and runs through X11, causing problems with window raising, copy, paste, etc? Or is that old information? Or am I just making it up?

I'm also a big fan of native widgets too. I know look and feel shouldn't matter all that much... but it just doesn't match anything else. This may actually be the biggest reason I go with Word over OO.o...

odf (integrating with document management or any other system is so goddamn easy, it's not funny anymore ;) )

Agreed.

Re:Congrats...

[big tex]

Deep breaths, there.

I'm talking MS word. I'd love to run KOffice, but until it's windows capable, I'm using MS at work. If it's a document that goes out as PDF, I use OO.o, otherwise word.

Oh, no I can't run Linux - AutoCAD and RISA3D (structural engineering software) only work on Windows.

Re:Congrats...

[richlv]

Yes, it takes 15 seconds to find it. (I suspect that's an exaggeration for someone who doesn't have someone else there. I know at least I started going through menus just reading every option. I'd guess that'd take 30 seconds.)

But then it takes another 15 seconds to find the track changes feature. Maybe another 15 seconds to figure out how to add a header or footer (depending on what version of Word you're coming from). And another 15 seconds to figure out how to insert the page number.

it's probably harder to justify for people who use the software once a week. if you use it every day, learning the differences once isn't that much of a problem. besides, ms changes the interface, too. how do these people adapt then ? if somebody doesn't want to change, any reason will be good.

That's not hard to overcome though... you can add a 3rd party PDF output tool. It's more complicated, but I'd have it anyway for other programs. It's more flexible too.

is that the one that acts like a printer ? if so, it is not more flexible, because bookmarks, clickable index and other things won't work. if not, it has to hook into the exporting program.

Office is probably the worse MS software to use as an example of this actually.

still you have a freedom to move from one platform to another, use the same format etc. not that you have to do that every week :)

Oh, and isn't the Mac build not native, and runs through X11

there are two builds - x11 and neooffice/j. second one supposedly is better at integrating, but it is not the latest & reatest version. too bad apple is not embracing oo.org :/

I don't know my way around styles much, especially in OO.o; can you explain how it's better?

they work ? :)
no, really, you have to work with them and understand what they do.
unless you already knew, take a look at http://oooauthors.org/en/authors/userguide2/writer /published_final/0207WG-WorkingWithStyles.odt (or any other styles guide). then there's the fact that msoffice has no concept of page styles at all (so i am told). which can result in veeeery interesting documents that are impossible to fix in msword.

I'm also a big fan of native widgets too.

um. oo.org 2.0 should use native widgets, wether they are win/gtk/qt (qt might have been added at some later 2.0.x version). and generic widgets are not dropped.

i suggest you try latest stable oo.org version. if something is not working like it should, report it.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[stupidfoo]

I'm thirsty! Do you Gnow where I kan find some Koffee?

what i'd like to see..

[slashes]

I wouldn't be suprised if I saw koffice and openoffice merge sometime in the future. Althougth I don't think it'll ever happen, it would bring some sort of unity and give us open source users an opportunity to trump MS office and yet another reason why we don't need to use a certain OS but in fact use whatever OS WE WISH so that we could type files in a .doc format or whatever format.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[Motley Phule]

Of course adding together two pieces of software and two software teams does not automatically create a superior product - despite what Darth Gates and Micro$oft would have you believe.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[psxman]

According to Wikipedia, OpenOffice.org intends to merge with Gnome Office.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[rduke15]

if I saw koffice and openoffice merge

I certainly hope they don't. KOffice may be one of the very few chances we have to escape the awful bloatwares and clumsywares that are both MS-Office and OpenOffice. I haven't tried KOffice yet, but I sure wish it is very different.

(BTW, TextMaker despite it's drawbacks (not free, not Open Source, proprietary file format) is the only usable Linux/Windows word processor I have seen so far. Before Linux there was Ami Pro, but unfortunately that is long dead)

Re:what i'd like to see..

[pembo13]

When I see these comments, I assume that the commenters are doing things with their Wordprocessors that I am simply not doing, and so I am ignorant in that regard. So out of curiousity, what exactly do you need from a wordprocessor that is lacking in curremt Linux apps. I doubt things like startup speed are what you are considering.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[nuzak]

> Darth Gates and Micro$oft

My goodness, you're suave. You must get all the girls.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[jbolden]

I can give you think my wife needs that are in Word and not even in OO

Integration with commercial bibliography software
Z99.50 networking integration (automatic pulls from library databases)

For lots of other people its macros and VBA integration.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[Motley Phule]

I do, much to my wife's charign. Ah, well.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[rduke15]

out of curiousity, what exactly do you need from a wordprocessor that is lacking in curremt Linux apps. I doubt things like startup speed are what you are considering.

Startup speed is also important. But not essential.

Simplicity is the most important thing. To achieve that, a word processor needs well thought out, clear and easy styles management. Also, it shouldn't change what I type to something else without my specifically configuring it to do so. Both Word and OO seem to love doing just that. Like when you type a quote character while talking about a 15" screen, it becomes some fancy typographic quote, or when you start a line with "-" it becomes some bullet, etc. All this can be nice if the user configures it. But I don't want to be constantly distracted while typing, by a program which thinks it knows better and it would be cool to type something else than what I did. And forcing me to interrupt my work to go hunting for hours through the menus to switch off stupid stuff I have never asked for. (never found how to prevent Word from adding a space before punctuation like ":" and others).

For me, I hate Word, and OO is simply the same thing but much worse (and much slower too).

Yes, I need to find the time some day to write down these things in a clear way. And I should probably have a look at Lyx.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[Anonymous Coward]

TextMaker 2006 supports OpenDocument. Beta for Linux in a few weeks...

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

(too lazy to log in...)

Re:what i'd like to see..

[rduke15]

TextMaker 2006 supports OpenDocument

No, it does not! It can import OpenDocument, but cannot save in this format.

What is needed is word processors which natively and by default saves in an open and well documented format.

But as I said, TextMaker is way ahead the others in usability. I hope it keeps improving, and adopts an open format for saving documents.

Re:what i'd like to see..

[Anonymous Coward]

The shipping version IMPORTS OpenDocument, and we are also working on EXPORT filters. Sorry for not being more explicit.

-mk

Re:what i'd like to see..

[pembo13]

I must admit that I dislike the auto correcting features myself, but in all fairness I am quite aware of how to turn them off, I guess I just don't type enough to get annoyed enough. I must say though, I never liked (or volunteerily used) MS Word. Before OO.org i used Corel Worfperfect, and before that I used Novel Wordperfect. (think I used it on an old Apple computer too)

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Kmart.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

iAgree.

I still don't get it......

[ami-in-hamburg]

I love KDE on my OpenSuse box, but.......

KOffice is nice, yes, but it's only KDE (or Mac OS).

OpenOffice is nice, yes, it's multiplatform.

OpenFormats are nice, yes, they are everywhere (or at least could be).

Therefore, even a dumbass can figure out they want OpenOffice rather than KOffice. I wish they would merge (or could merge), and wipe MS Office off the face of the planet.

Until then, we're stuck with two very talented development teams struggling for market share with very similar packages working against eachother rather than building a SuperOffice package together.

Ah, the benefits of OSS, FOSS and Linux!

Re:I still don't get it......

[Just Some Guy]

Therefore, even a dumbass can figure out they want OpenOffice rather than KOffice.

Go ahead and explain to this dumbass why I want to give up a program that fits in with the rest of my desktop, supports KIOslaves, and is document-compatible with your office suite of choice. Really, I'm waiting...

The reason for their coexistence is that they have two different design philosophies, two different styles of programming, are built on two completely different frameworks, and appeal to two different groups of people (KDE users versus everyone else). How would you expect them to reconcile those differences? Do you also want KHTML to merge with Gecko? After all, they both do the same thing.

Re:I still don't get it......

[mctk]

The talented development teams did merge. They did create a SuperOffice package. It's called MSOffice. Now we're facing the problems of relenquishing control to one big software packaging behemoth.

Re:I still don't get it......

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather keep them separate and leave all the BLOAT from OpenOffice.org out of my snapy KOffice.

On FreeBSD, OOo requires over 9GB of disk space to compile via ports.

I'd rather still have a choice then having to go back to Wine + MS Office 97.

anyway, when QT4 is released "soon" you'll probably start to find some of the KApplications on other platforms like Windows and Mac OS X :)

Re:I still don't get it......

[cozziewozzie]

People are a bit confused about this "KOffice is only KDE" business.

A modern office suite needs to build on top of a really solid foundation in terms of widgets and supporting library.

OpenOffice (and StarOffice before it) chose to design everything from scratch. Every menu, every window, every pixel is hand-drawn by the program itself. They have a very powerful toolkit in VCL which DUPLICATES all that a toolkit should do. They coded all their dialogs from scratch, font handling from scratch, print support from scratch. Skins and themes - from scratch.

Basically, OpenOffice folks wrote half an operating system to make their office suite. Mozilla did something very similar. And then people wonder where the bloat is coming from!

There is another way to write applications. You look around, and see that there is a very very powerful library foundations out there. You get menus for free. Dialogs. Font handling. Network transparency. Buttons. Canvas. Printing. Image input/output. Sound. This set of libraries is called KDE, although you could use GNOME to a similar extent.

Why on Earth should KOffice people reinvent the wheel yet another time, when there is a very powerful library that does all of this already?

If you download OpenOffice.org, in its 300 MB, you download a whole toolkit plus half an operating system in bloat.

If you download KOffice, just download kdelibs while you're at it. You don't need the rest of KDE! Just look at it as another library providing functionality.

We shouldn't go back in time and recode each menu pixel-for-pixel in every single application. StarOffice did this out of legacy reasons and now we're stuck with it. But in this day and age, people use libraries which take care of this stuff, so you can concentrate on functionality.

Re:I still don't get it......

[Arandir]

I wish they would merge...

I don't think you realize what you are saying. From a technical standpoint, it's nonsensical and nearly impossible. In terms of vendor lock-in, it's replacing one shackle with another. In terms of freedom and choice, you don't have any. In terms of morality, you have no right to tell another what code they can or cannot write.

Re:I still don't get it......

[undertow3886]

Actually, when I run OOo 2.0 on KDE, there is rudimentary support for KIO slaves. But as long as they both use OpenDocument, they both have equal right to exist.

Re:I still don't get it......

[adtifyj]

OpenOffice inherited a lot of this bloat from its predecessor, StarOffice.

Also, a more appropriate comparison is that the OpenOffice codebase includes a subset of the KDE functionality. This "bloat", written to be cross-platform from the outset, is why OpenOffice works on Microsoft Windows now, and KOffice does not.

Re:I still don't get it......

[m50d]

Also, a more appropriate comparison is that the OpenOffice codebase includes a subset of the KDE functionality. This "bloat", written to be cross-platform from the outset, is why OpenOffice works on Microsoft Windows now, and KOffice does not.

No, that's coincidental. Look at audacity for something happy to use an existing library and very crossplatform. And look at say xine for something that implements its own widgets and is still linux-only.

Re:I still don't get it......

[Anonymous Coward]

Qt4 was released a good while ago, the KDE 4 version of kdelibs is still in development (they are taking this chance to change a lot of stuff, like plasma, phonon, and solid to name just the big projects). With KDE4 there are plans to have the apps run on Windows and OS X as well (KOffice 2.0 is planning on having a native windows & os x version, neither of which using an X server mind you).

On a side note, its big 'Q' little 't' and pronounced like 'cute' (I originally thought it was QT also).

Re:I still don't get it......

[Anonymous Coward]

You just can't win. If you make an application use the local widget set, people sob and whine about how it looks different depending on where you run it. If you make an application use a single widget set, people sob and whine about how it looks wrong compared to the local widget set.

If you write your own widget set from scratch that looks as close to the local widget set as possible without having to deal with the fact that no two widget sets do the same thing in the same way (*cough*comboboxes*cough*), then everyone gets up in arms about it.

This is why I stick to vim, nobody whines about how the buttons aren't rounded correctly in OSX or how the win32 dropdown box widget isn't fucking the display of everything else up like it should be on windows or how it doesn't integrate with personal-favorite-window-manager in Linux.

Re:I still don't get it......

[sg7jimr]

Every menu, every window, every pixel is hand-drawn by the program

The program has hands? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just do the whole thing the computer way rather than the human way?

I'd heard OpenOffice.org was getting bloated...I'm not sure if this is being innovative or just spooky. Either way, I'll take a handless program like KOffice. Seems much safer and more proper.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Tow_cow]

iAgree.

winMeToo

But it still can't print!

[Just Some Guy]

I like KWord - really, I do - but I can't use it because the printed results are awful. Basically, no matter how good the documents look on my screen, the kerning of their printed versions is completely broken (under both Gentoo and FreeBSD with two different laser printers). The problem supposedly lies with QT3, or so I've read, but that doesn't change the fact that I currently cannot use KWord for anything that will end in a hardcopy.

I know this sounds like a troll but I don't mean it that way. I'd switch from OpenOffice to KOffice in a heartbeat if I could, but I just can't do it right now. Please, please! make printing work right and I'll be eternally grateful.

Re:But it still can't print!

[user317]

I know this sounds like a troll but I don't mean it that way. I'd switch from OpenOffice to KOffice in a heartbeat if I could, but I just can't do it right now. Please, please! make printing work right and I'll be eternally grateful.

the pdfs that I export with koffice look exactly like the document on the screen, you should be able to print those anywhere.

Re:But it still can't print!

[Just Some Guy]

the pdfs that I export with koffice look exactly like the document on the screen

My PDF output looks nothing at all like my KWord screen. To make those images, I imported a Word doc that our transcriptionist emailed to us, then printed to PDF. I took a screenshot of KWord and KPDF using The Gimp, and cropped each shot to show a representative snippet of text.

Unfortunately, the PDF looks much more like my printed output that I'd like. I have no idea why my printing looks so awful (only through KWord; oowriter2 looks fine), but that's a pretty accurate example of how bad it is.

Other than the fact that I can't print from it, I love KWord. Of course, that's like asking Mrs. Lincoln how she liked the play.

Re:But it still can't print!

[Bogtha]

If you prefer KOffice to OpenOffice for everything but printing, why don't you edit your documents in KOffice, and print them from OpenOffice? Isn't that the whole point of using open file formats?

Re:But it still can't print!

[Maltheus]

Ironic since my problem is I hate how openoffice's print dialogs are so anemic compared to KDE's. I have to export to PDF and print in KDPF to get what I want. Making OpenOffice use kprinter doesn't work so well for me. I was only reading this thread cause I was hoping KOffice would be my ideal solution.

Re:But it still can't print!

[psocccer]

To be honest I have never printed from kword before, I usually use oowriter as my primary word processor, even though I may only use it once or twice a month. However I was curious about this kword issue, and I have 1.5 installed on my Debian box here and ran a test printing to PDF and comparing it to the on-screen image. The result is available here with the PDF on the left and the on-screen on the right (I assume the red/green fuzzies are because it's trying to do nicer type output on my laptop screen). So I'm not saying you don't have a problem printing, but as of this 1 test on this 1 sample on my computer your problem might be fixed in kword 1.5. At least it will cost you nothing to try :p

Re:But it still can't print!

[mortonda]

PDF on the left and the on-screen on the right

I'm usually really bad at seeing the difference between fonts, and yet, I can say that the text on the left still looks horrible. You can see it most in the word "be".

Re:But it still can't print!

[Fred_A]

I remember seing this when poking around in Koffice quite some time ago. I didn't press the issue then since I didn't want to have data in yet another format anyway. So I just used StarOffice.

FWIW I now use OOo for generic text and Scribus for stuff that requires complex layout. I might look at KOffice again if it conforms to OpenDocument standards.

Re:But it still can't print!

[Just Some Guy]

I can say that the text on the left still looks horrible. You can see it most in the word "be".

Exactly! My PDF sample was actually a bit worse than my normal printing results, but his sample is precisely what I see most often. Some letters are spaced widely, while others literally overlap. The result is so awful that my wife's nurse even asked why her dictation looked so bad and whether we could change it.

Re:But it still can't print!

[jbolden]

Open the .pdf in a text editor. .pdf is a forth like language. Search for the text from your document and look for a font setting. You may be getting a very bad bitmap export. I think you have the printer setup wrong rather than a KWord problem (though the setup may be at the KDE level).

Re:But it still can't print!

[Anonymous Coward]

Build the document in KWord. Print it with OOo.

Once again, the power of open standards saves the day.

Re:But it still can't print!

[Anonymous Coward]

With KOffice 2.0 and the move to Qt4 this problem will go away completely. Its a known issue, and theres pretty much no way for them to fix it before 2.0 (at least without an insane amount of work, far more than would be needed for the 2.0 release probably), also 2.0 is going to be the next release (not counting 1.5.x bug fix releases)

Re:But it still can't print!

[Anonymous Coward]

i had the same problem trying to print to a pdf in any kde program, until i did this: in qtconfig, in the printer tab, i disabled "enable font embedding".

Re:But it still can't print!

[sootman]

Just take screenshots of each page and print those. Duh. :-)

Re:But it still can't print!

[Just Some Guy]

I think you have the printer setup wrong rather than a KWord problem (though the setup may be at the KDE level).

That's possible, but I wouldn't expect to get the same bad results with several versions of KWord on two different operating systems and two different laser printers. My home printer is a LaserJet 1200, and I send it PostScript via CUPS. Here's my entire printers.conf:

<DefaultPrinter huffalump>
Info huffalump
Location Kirk's desk
DeviceURI usb:/dev/unlpt0
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
</Printer>

As far as I know, I'm using the default settings in KDE that you get when adding a new printer. That's definitely the case at work when spooling PostScript to our old LaserJet 4.

Re:But it still can't print!

[jbolden]

That's the wrong setting. You are at too high a level. I'm trying to find out how its embedding fonts. I know what bad bitmaps look like and that was it.
Another from experience said it was font embedding: "qtconfig, in the printer tab, i disabled "enable font embedding"
A third said to turn off embedding under He said its under system options -> fonts.

So now you've gotten the same advice 3x. I'd say problem solved.

Re:But it still can't print!

[stinerman]

I've seen that same font distortion when browsing the web using Firefox under Fedora Core 4. This was in web pages, mind you, not anything that got screwy when I printed or exported to PDF.

Large documents

[MagerValp]

How does KWord compare to MS Word when it comes to writing large documents? Our PhD students always run into problems with MS Word when they work on their dissertations. As the document grows larger, more and more weird things happen: footnotes jump around, images move to other pages, tables get resized for no apparent reason, and so on. We're mostly a Mac shop, so when Adobe decided not to make an OS X version of FrameMaker we kind of ran out of a decent alternative, but since there seems to be a native Mac port of KOffice I guess we should take a closer look.

Re:Large documents

[Ecko7889]

The problem may be a result of bad information handling by the product. The standards of OSS are much higher than a closed product, due to the ability of community reaction. You may want to try a OSS office suite, and compare that to the use of MSWord. I believe this would be a good point of comparrsion. If MSWord is found to better handle large documents, then maybe OSS suite might need some updating.

Re:Large documents

[Anonymous Coward]

I would suggest you look into LaTeX as it is cross-platform, creates fantastic looking documents and after the learning curve at the start is very easy to use. I will churn through just about anything you give it, a number of publishers still use LaTeX for their books, so size is not an issue.

Re:Large documents

[Anonymous Coward]

If you liked FrameMaker - you really need to switch over to Adobe InDesign - it is a PHENOMINAL application for multi-page documents. It is extremely feature-rich, but it is certainly light years ahead of FrameMaker.

Re:Large documents

[wrong un]

Trust me, If you are writing a PhD thesis then a word processor is last thing you want to use. Open up a text editor and use LateX.
It will save you loads of time and grief in the long run. Word documents are fine for 1 page memo's and the like, but if you want a beautiful looking manuscript there is only one option.
I've seen people literally go mad trying to write their thesis in Word once the page count gets high.

Re:Large documents

[alexhs]

I agree with the sibling AC : LaTeX is the perfect tool to write scientific publications.
And if you don't like the "coding style" of LaTeX, you can use LyX.

Re:Large documents

[andersa]

I tried to write my bachelor thesis in KWord, but I had to give it up after 10 pages or so. Page breaks would happen inconsistently, so paragraphs would jump from page to page in an unpredictable manor. Also inline math looked increasingly bad as more formulas were added to the document. It also slowed down considerably.

I went to Lyx instead. I didn't want to learn pure latex, and lyx worked like a charm, once you got the hang of it's little qirks.

Re:Large documents

[Gramie2]

You've seen people literally go mad? That must really be something!

Re:Large documents

[XchristX]

Get kile (Latex frontend for KDE) from http://kile.sourceforge.net/ . It's latex rendering is clean, and you can look up latex markups from the menus (instead of having to break out Leslie Lamport's book every time you forget how to include well-indented graphics or whatever).

Re:Large documents

[XchristX]

The problem with Lyx is that it's basically a frontend for latex, which is a frontend for Tex.

Too many frontends. The markup elegance gets lost somewhere. You'll have to convert Lyx to latex before sending it to some journals, and the conversion is horrible, and a mess for mass printing (using \overrightarrow instead of \vec and so forth).

Better to stick to a simple environment for latex, like kile (http://kile.sourceforge.net./ Worked for me so far.

Re:Large documents

[davids-world.com]

If you're in science, LaTeX is the way to go. On the Mac, you can use Aquamacs Emacs which is easy to use and comes with the AUCTeX environment to edit LaTeX comfortably. TeXShop is a good alternative.

However, if you're in the humanities or so, your students will likely be unable to learn LaTeX in reasonable time. In that case, I'd recommend Papyrus from ROM Logicware, which is a very fast text processor that can deal with large documents. (Their web site is crap, but try the Papyrus demo!). There are alternative editors, but Papyrus seems like the fastest word processor to me. Also, it's available for different systems, not just for Macs, and they have cheap licenses, I think.

Re:Large documents

[eldepeche]

If you're in the humanities, what formatting do you have to do besides citations, block quotations and bibliographies? Just make a style for a dissertation, and have them type the content in. To my mind, that's the biggest advantage of LaTeX: it does all the hard work for you.

Re:Large documents

[manly_15]

I've had decent success with Pages from iWork '06. I haven't done any *huge* documents with it, but it does a very good job of dealing with images, tables, etc. The Styles system is what I wish Word had. It also lets you control breaks in a very easy way, with options to prevent hanging lines and so on. The only problem I've had with it is that performance gets very slow, especially with tables or images (this is on a G4 867/640 Mb RAM). However, performance on a G4 1.5 eMac was fine so if your labs are reasonably up to date it might be worth looking into.

One other thing - the templates in Pages are *really* good. The first program for any kind of layout I've ever used where I will start with a template and modify as needed vs. just building from scratch.

Re:Large documents

[cel4145]

Beautiful looking manuscripts? LOL

University dissertation guidelines don't usualy facilitate beautiful looking manuscripts. Instead they represent how dissertations have been constructed for decades, pre-word processsor. OpenOffice works very well for this. I just finished a 52,000 word manuscript with 2.0 and never had a problem.

Re:Large documents

[MBAFK]

One way out of this is to split the document into chunks while working on drafts.

Apart from making it less likely to break the word processor it can make collaboration easier for when people are reading your drafts (you don't need your professor to check things in and out of CVS for instance).

When you are done with the major revisions you mark the document up in Latex. I have found this gives the best of all worlds, 'wiggly underlining' spell checking for my tpying, change tracking when people are helping you and then finally the power of Latex to produce a perfect final copy.

Re:Large documents

[jbolden]

How does \overrightarrow instead of \vec hurt mass printing? And what quantities are you talking about in terms of mass?

Re:Large documents

[jbolden]

By humanities I assume he meant social sciences:

They do:

diagrams
different fonts
often different languages
pictures
diagrams
tables
graphs

If its pure humanities work then I guess it depends which one. I'd assume an Art history dissertation is no piece of cake to typeset

Re:Large documents

[XchristX]

Well, let me elaborate.

I was at a seminar by an APS (American Physical Society) editing committee guy once, and he said that certain typesets render better on their mass printing systems than others (we are talking a worldwide distribution numbering in the hundreds of thousands), so they have been known to reject latex submissions with unnecessarily long or redundant typesettings (like people who use lots of $$ $$ instead of eqnarray{} and so on). He did not provide details.

Don't look at me. He said so. Usually, they try to make the changes themselves. However, for very long papers (review articles etc) they don't bother, they just send 'em back until the author(s) fix them.

I wrote my first paper in Lyx, converted it to Latex and submitted it to elsevier science in 1999. The rendering into dvi and postscript was fine . They sent it back, saying that the latex 'formatting' was poor and I had to do it 'better'. I took it to my research group secretary and he said the latex has to be much cleaner (I was only an undergrad back then and was new to latex). He re-edited the typesets and made it render the same content in the same way only the source was much cleaner and more organized (properly tabulated figures according to global templates, instead of what Lyx does, which is just \includegraphics followed by lots of \hspace* \vspace* for indentation).

Of course, bear in mind that this was way back in 1999. I haven't used Lyx since, preferring to stick to original latex. I dunno if the latex export thingie in Lyx has improved or not. It's not a big deal for me anymore since I have a lot of predefined stuff in latex for my papers and just recycle those.

Re:Large documents

[jbolden]

If you really are talking hundreds of thousands then you are talking a webpress. Which means nothing renders, its all analog data at print time. They are also using imposition software and they are going to be checking proofs.

So my guess is its not the printing that makes any difference its the guy doing the layout for the editing. In other words it could be one copy and it wouldn't matter. That guy may actually work directly in the TeX to layout the whole journal and he wants a consistent feel so no manual layouts (i.e. you have to use your style sheet so he can just redefine). My point is that you shouldn't associate those issues with "mass printing" they have nothing to do with the mass or the printing its "2nd party consolidated layout" or "non professional typesetting" that was the cause of the problem.

Re:Large documents

[colinrichardday]

It's not too difficult to make a LaTeX stylesheet to satisfy your university's dissertation-formatting requirements.

Re:Large documents

[Digit Machine]

I believe framemaker was replaced by InDesign. I've used it in my graphic design classes, and it works quite well. Expensive, though.

Re:Large documents

[davids-world.com]

While LaTeX is a technically great typesetting system for all of these cases, human factors play a crucial role here. What type of people study arts, history, classics, or also law or philosophy? Even in some more scientific subjects like psychology, you tend to find people who will very much prefer a WYSIWYG system. LaTeX looks like programming to them - the level of abstraction is too high.

That is not to say that a history student can't learn LaTeX. Hell, they would probably be happy with it and consistently use it. But getting there is too card, in the general case.

Re:Large documents

[MemoryDragon]

Well KWord is not really suitable for big docs, either use OpenOffice (believe me it scales really well with docs of a few hundred pages) or a DTP program, those are very good at doc sizes like that as well, or good ole LaTeX, proven stable, but somewhat unsexy, but it works.

Re:Large documents

[MagerValp]

I guess I should've known better than to leave out the disclaimer:

"Yes, I know about LaTeX, and we have quite a few happy LaTeX users here. It's not for everyone though, and I'm looking for an alternative for the MS Word users."

Re:Large documents

[zander]

In some tests I loaded 300 page documents in KWord that worked pretty fast and editing them worked just fine and again, very fast.

I have heard stories like yours about MSWord and if KWord has the features you want then I do suggest you use it, yes. The features that are there tend to be quite stable. Just, please, stay away from tables; use embedded KSpread documents instead if you really need a table.

Re:Large documents

[netean]

it wasn't a Phd, but it was about 200-odd pages I edited in Kword - however this was Kword 1.3- i think..

It was superb, dare I even say enjoyable.
It exported to pdf without problem (although some people with acrobat 4 found that text looked blurred - too much anti-aliasing perhaps) but it looked great in Acrobat 5 and 6.

Printed well, without problem, re-edited well.

If I still had a linux partition I'd be using it today (gave up with linux ages ago). I'm very looking forward to the native windows version sometime. Kword is a joy to use - small, fast, easy to understand and use. Looks nice and just works.

Re:Large documents

[zander]

Well KWord is not really suitable for big docs

Why not?
There were some bugfixes since rc1 that make KWord a lot faster for big documents. I don't see any reasons or open bugreports on why a big doc would be hard to create.

Re:Large documents

[richlv]

seems that you were eaten alive by latexed maniacs =)

i haven't used kword much, but several friends have used oo.org for long documents. if the document gets really long and you still want a familiar environment (wysiwyg text editor, not scribus/*x/whatever), take a look at oo.org master documents. that should be relatively easy to do and could help to manage the amount of data.

though with a mac versions of oo.org you currently have a dilemma between x11 version and slightly older neooffice.

Re:Large documents

[jbolden]

I think people in the arts are pretty good at handling abstract tools. Seeing a statue from a chisel and hunk of rock takes much more vision than seeing how to assemble a LaTeX document. Similarly with classics. Law is super easy to typeset. I really do believe these people could make the switch.

More importantly the discussion was really stuff like LyX, TeXmacs, where the actual TeX can be hidden (mostly).

Re:Large documents

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention diagrams!

Re:Large documents

[Ford Prefect]

There are alternative editors, but Papyrus seems like the fastest word processor to me. Also, it's available for different systems, not just for Macs, and they have cheap licenses, I think.

I think part of the reason for its speed is that it was originally designed for Atari computers - I used to use Papyrus 3.66 on my 8MHz, 4MB Atari ST in the mid-1990s, and did all my A-levels stuff with it. That was the version written in GFA Basic (but you'd never have guessed from the speed, full WYSIWYG and NeXT-inspired interface), subsequent versions were based on a full rewrite in C.

The programmers behind it definitely know how to produce fast, portable code...

The website!

My work now means I need to use Microsoft Word for everything (Papyrus's import and export features are a bit basic), but if you simply need to print or save as PDF, then Papyrus is well worth a try. There's a near-full-functional demo after all, and once the full version is purchased it's a 6MB download.

Highly recommended.

Re:Large documents

[zander]

Did you consider that the KWord devs said this release made things a LOT more stable for a reason?

Re:Large documents

[andersa]

No? Did they say that?

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[tepples]

As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "k" or a "g" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Linux zealots (a.k.a. "Power" users).

As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "microsoft" or a "i" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Windows and Mac OS zealots (a.k.a. "Least Common Denominator" users).

KOffice

[vettemph]

>>This makes KOffice a member of a very select group

But will it run on Windows?!??!?

Re:KOffice

[Zphbeeblbrox]

Yes.

Re:KOffice

[cozziewozzie]

It will when version 2.0 (built on KDE 4 and Qt4) comes out.

Re:KOffice

[sloanster]

(shrug) who cares? windoze users will user whatever they use... in the meantime I'm happy to see some healthy competition among linux office suites with interchangeble document formats...

Uh....

[Sir Unimaginative]

The really awesome thing about OpenDocument is that the suites never have to merge.

And you're right, it won't ever happen. Because some people will want some killer feature only KOffice has, and some people will want some feature only OpenOffice has.

Unity? Pah. The whole point of open source is that unity is neither necessary nor (typically) desirable. If you CAN use the same stuff in ANYTHING, ON anything, WHY would you want to use it in only ONE thing?

Re:Uh....

[undertow3886]

Exactly. Last time I tried KOffice, its OOo import support was really bad. Hopefully now with OpenDocument that's changed.

Re:Uh....

[GreatBunzinni]

Inded. After all, who in their right mind would want to use a heavy WYSIWYG text processor when tools like TeX and LaTeX exist for decades? Yet, people still wanted to try out new stuff like MS Word, OO Writer and KWord.

And by the way, diversity was, is and always will be a good thing. It's the key to evolution, after all.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Grishnakh]

And this is different from Apple's naming scheme how? iTunes, iPod, iLife, etc. Apple seems to be doing quite well, and people like their products. "iPod" is synonymous with portable MP3 player.

Products don't need horribly boring, uninspired names like "SQL Server", "Server 2003", "Media Player", etc. in order to be successful.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[f0dder]

Look at the success of Ogg Vorbis.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, maybe it should be kCrappy kNaming kScheme? That would make all the kDifference!

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Curl E]

Products don't need horribly boring, uninspired names like "SQL Server", "Server 2003", "Media Player", etc. in order to be successful.

Microsoft: the "Snakes on a Plane" of software naming.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[gold23]

Circle-K?

Stability

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trying to troll here, I'm directing an honest question to those of you that use KOffice: Is this suite still plagued by stability problems? I have never been able to do anything with it, even as KDE entered the 3.x releases, because it crashed, and unlike other suites, this *always* resulted in data loss with KO.

I think this particular issue is profoundly more important than the data standards one, and it seems like every press release ignores this. MS Office is a trainwreck, and OpenOffice 2.0 is having some strange issues (probably memory leaks) on Linux. Neither of those, or the WP Office suite, are particularly efficient in terms of resources. KOffice fills a niche formerly occupied by MS Works: A lightweight "office" app that doesn't assault the user with thousands of questionably-useful features, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

As far as open document standards: Their heart's in the right place, but an industry-wide standards move is likely to hurt more than help. Either innovation is going to be stifled by forcing all developers to work with the lowest common denominator, or someone will game the system by creating endless arguments in the standards committee. Patent-free, fully-documented, and intelligently-designed formats are what we need. Barring that, the user should be the one specifying the format, or at least a third party who is technically proficient and has the user's needs in mind.

p.s. I hate the new Open Office formats. They're garbage. The compressed archive with multiple components is the best approach I've ever seen.

Re:Stability

[ingwa]

The stability is much, much better, especially for KWord. That was one of the goals of this release.

That said, if you still experience crashes we would be very grateful if you reported them at bugs.kde.org. We actually do care and do read the reports, and have fixed many of them already just because they were reported.

Krita

[psocccer]

Anyone who's ever complained about the gimp needs to check out Krita, the paint application in KOffice. As of 1.5, it now has support for adjustment layers and layer groups, 2 of the things I missed most in the gimp. It also has CMYK support and does not have separate windows for all the tools (something that never bothered me but soooo many people complain about it). The difference between 1.4 and 1.5 of Krita is absolutely amazing, I figure give them 6 more months and they will have passed gimp in functionality. Too bad Krita is KDE only though, so no help for windows users looking for a good free photo editing suite.

Re:Krita

[denisbergeron]

Well ! maybe it's support 16bits, but it doesn't support RAW pictures! It's like transfering CD to a 4track tape ans using this tape to encore the music in MP3 !

Re:Krita

[Arkham79]

On the Windows front I've been using Paint .Net since Beta and am pretty pleased with it. Granted, it lacks some of the advanced features of Adobe PS and the like, but for Joe Photo Editor it does the job just fine.

Re:Krita

[Kjella]

Too bad Krita is KDE only though, so no help for windows users looking for a good free photo editing suite.

Yet. Qt4 for Windows is GPL, KDE is moving to Qt4 which means it'll run on Windows eventually. You can still make it happen today with Cygwin, but that's not a consumer-friendly solution. Give it 12 months and you can probably run Krita on Windows.

Re:Krita

[m50d]

It will work on windows as soon as the windows port of kdelibs is done

Re:Krita

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it support color profiles and proofing? Cinepaint is the only linux app that I have found so far that will allow me to apply Costco photo printer profiles.

Re:Krita

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Krita is KDE only though, so no help for windows users looking for a good free photo editing suite.

There is always a solution. Let met think... Why not telling them to use KDE if you think their applications are good ?

Price are very low : between 0 and a few dizains of euros. Anyway, much less than what it is worth.

I suggest this because it's not the first time I read "Yeah, this KDE application is exactly what I need, too bad that I don't use KDE". Maybe the fact that more and more applications like Amarok, , Basket(still beta but try it and you will love it), K3B, Kate (vim and emacs will soon surrender ;-), KPhotoAlbum, Kontact... just to name a few are very enjoyable and perfectly integrated could be a hint that this move may be wise.

After all : Apple's business plan, which is not to urge to port ASAP every brand new shiny feature to windows, seems to work too. Wouldn't it make sense to try the same : giving Linux/KDE the success it deserves instead of a asking to add more 2nd grade freeware to the windows platform which doesn't really need it ?

Re:Krita

[Anonymous Coward]

Rick Brewster has no ears.

Re:Krita

[cgenman]

I asked a similar question on OSNews about KMail when 1.5 went into Beta. One of the developers said, basically, that it all should run on windows in about 12 months thanks to the Qt port.

Now, we all know what 12 months means in Open Source calendars. But the point is that it should work before Vista ships.

Re:Krita

[vurian]

Er, Krita does support RAW pictures. I should know, I coded the support myself. You need to have dcraw installed, though.

Re:Krita

[caffeination]

Interesting. Thank you very much for this. As a beginner-intermediate graphics program user, I don't have any major technical words in my list of needs. I'll probably be able to move gradually over to this program now (it's always been there, I just didn't know - typical KDE losing decent apps into the bloat), especially when they reproduce/port the few GIMP filters etc that I use a lot.

I hope they organise the filters in the same way as GIMP as the featurelist grows (obviously right now there's no need for a Blur submenu with only one blur option, for example). Actually, I'll be annoyed and stop using it if they don't. So far, the emboss submenu seems justified, but it's little touches like calling it "edge detection" instead of "edge detect" that they need to watch out for.

Re:Krita

[zander]

Please, actually try Krita from KOffice 1.5 (and not a 7 months old one); the filter menu looks a LOT bigger there. And more organized as well :)

Re:Krita

[caffeination]

Just as soon as it passes the Volkerding test, my friend. All this stability comes at a price.

Re:Krita

[vurian]

Well, firstly, you're looking at the old 1.4 version of Krita, not 1.5. In 1.5 the filter menu has been reorganized, filters have been added, and we've added a very nice filters gallery dialog that I personally always use. Secondly, I'm not a "they", I'm a "you" -- if you've got suggestions for improvement, why not drop by on #koffice, or kimageshop@kde.org, or even mail me personally and discuss your suggestions. If you can manage to refrain from trite phrases like "lost in the bloat" and "I will stop using it if you don't do what I want", then you will stand a very good chance of being listened to. Boudewijn Rempt, Krita maintainer

Re:Krita

[denisbergeron]

Well ! That is very good ! May be It's the last thing I need to come back to windows.... But someone have to made an update about the raw support on the KDE / Krita site !

Re:Krita

[JabberWokky]

Yes, but I have no idea how many or how well. There's already been complaints from users because when you create a new image, it asks you for colorspace, and some users think that's too complicated and technical.

Ah, feature balance.

(There was also a fleeting bug in the kubuntu packages where the colorspaces weren't registered until kbuildsycoca was manually run, something that should be always be part of a KDE app install).

--
Evan

Re:Krita

[caffeination]

Heh, the trite is strictly for the purposes of Slashdot. I can even take back what I said about "hidden in bloat", because it wasn't hidden. I've just found it in the Office section (in Slackware 10.2). It would have been the first graphics program I opened to try, if it had been with the others (I know that this isn't much less inflammatory than "hidden in bloat").

The other point about getting annoyed and stopping using it isn't the coercive threat you make it out to be, just a comment that I've invested a lot of time in learning GIMP, and it'd be too frustrating to keep using krita if it turned into too much of a leap from GIMP.

But seriously, I'm not the kind of user that can give useful feedback or suggestions, at least not beyond the level of the point you've already seen. Similarly, that menu is called "Filter" instead of "Filters", which breaks the standard in both GIMP and Krita (all the others are plural). Probably changed by now though - Slackware is a little behind.

Re:Krita

[vurian]

The "Filter" is probably going to stay -- it does follow the KDE standard.

Poor table support

[GeekBoy]

I'd love to use it, but the table support is sooooo bad compared to OOW or MS Office that I just can't use it.

Re:Poor table support

[ElleyKitten]

Appearently table support is one of the things they worked on for this version. You should give it another chance.

Re:Poor table support

[GeekBoy]

I tried the Betas and RC's. Not much of an improvement, until their table support is on par with MS Office and OO.org it's going to be a non-starter.

Re:Poor table support

[zander]

No, we didn't work on Table support very much, we just made it crash less on tables. You, for example, still can't have a table bigger then a page.

Tables will be re-done in 2.0, most probably.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Kjella]

As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "k" or a "g" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Linux zealots (a.k.a. "Power" users).

Aww, that isn't even a good troll anymore. At least you could take it one step further to the root of the issue and say it'll never appeal to anyone but Linux zealots as long as you need to prefix it with "k" or "g" to indicate what toolkit it uses, which endusers shouldn't have to give a fuck about. If it was just the name it wouldn't be any greater issue than iMacs with iLife, the iUniverse and iEverything.

LaTeX?

[rmcd]

This is off-topic but may be a help to you. I don't know what academic area your ph.d students are in, but in the sciences, math, and economics, the use of LaTeX is very common. (I'm guessing if you were in one of those areas you would already know about it.) LaTeX performs wonderfully with arbitrarily huge documents --- I published a 900-page book using it. On the other hand, if you need to do a lot of fine-grained page-by-page formatting, it probably isn't for you. There are LaTeX solutions for the Mac, but I haven't used them.

To be honest I find Word to be a mess. I know some people love it but I find it unusable.

Re:LaTeX?

[Goalie_Ca]

Every journal and conference i know of has a latex template. I don't know anyone personally using anything else. Its insane!

Re:LaTeX?

[brwski]

Mac solutions rock: TeXShop + XeTeX is a powerful combination. LaTeX simply can't be beat for consistency and ease of use once the basics are put to memory.

Re:LaTeX?

[jbolden]

There are a dozen very good TeX implementations for Mac.

Re:LaTeX?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree. Any Ph.D. stupid enough to use MS-Word for his/her thesis deserves his fate. Latex isn't not especially easy to use, in fact it can be pretty darn twisted for some tasks, but it is *rock* solid and scales to any size document. Since it doesn't change all the time, once you do figure out how to do something, that is usually the end of it.

Re:LaTeX?

[gatzke]

LyX is a great front end for LaTeX Processing. It helps with the learning curve.

You can still do all the stuff you want from LaTex in lyx.

There is a version that runs on cygwin with and auto installer (you need a lot of components to get stuff to work, auto install should help).

Not quite WYSIWYG, but at least your equations and tables should work ok. LaTeX is the only way for complex documents.

http://wiki.lyx.org/pmwiki.php/Windows/LyXWinInsta ller

Re:LaTeX?

[MagerValp]

I guess I should've known better than to leave out the disclaimer:

"Yes, I know about LaTeX, and we have quite a few happy LaTeX users here. It's not for everyone though, and I'm looking for an alternative for the MS Word users."

Re:LaTeX?

[BenjyD]

The last conference I submitted to (CAPE2004) made it very clear that the use of Word was greatly preferred to LaTeX. They only provided a Word template and made lots of fuss about the PDF I submitted. Very annoying, but I think that might be the way things are headed.

Killustrator, Kontour, Karbon14, Inkscape

[notmyrealslashdotacc]

How does Karbon14 relate to Killustrator and Kontour? Is it the same codebase? Is there any reason to think it will have anything to offer that Inkscape doesn't? Inkscape is getting pretty darn mature in almost every area, with a few exceptions such as rendering gradients (last time I checked).

Re:Killustrator, Kontour, Karbon14, Inkscape

[BlueLightning]

KIllustrator was renamed to Kontour because of legal issues. AFAIK after development work on Kontour basically stopped, Karbon14 was created and replaced Kontour as the drawing application for KOffice 1.3 and later.

I haven't used any of these applications seriously, but I imagine that what you get most from Karbon14 as opposed to Inkscape is better integration with KDE. The same applies to most of the other KOffice applications.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

i was looking at the components of kOffice and found the best proof for what you say: kSpread.

That's not a software name, that's dialogue with a whore.

Leading in...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Industry buzz
2. Being ridiculously slow

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[michrech]

I'm thirsty! Do you Gnow where I kan find some Koffee?

At Krispy-Kreme?

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[cpm8080]

I don't like that either but it is better than Microsoft Word, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, etc. I have a hard time figuring out the k application naming. Gnome seams to make more sense to me, personally. To tell you the truth, I abandoned k because of it and I've been using gnome for almost an year now. I believe I'm more productive in gnome than I ever was with k. My 2 cents.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[nbritton]

Um no, but you can get Kaffeine here


--
BSD Podcasts @ http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[suv4x4]

"As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "microsoft" or a "i" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Windows and Mac OS zealots (a.k.a. "Least Common Denominator" users)."

Oh so using Windows makes me part of the Least Common Denominator guys, great. Where's the holy temple I can praise you, oh almighty Linux user?

ODF in OOfice?

[caluml]

Forgive my ignorance, but (running OOfice 1.1.5 (binary due to AMD64, blah blah)), I don't have an ODF option? Or is it the native OpenOffice document formats?
(I know this is a KOffice thread, but maybe some knowledgable people are reading).

Re:ODF in OOfice?

[Anonymous Coward]

OOfice 2.0.3 will work on AMD64, so just wait for it.

Re:ODF in OOfice?

[richlv]

what odf option are you really talking about ?
1.1.5 should support opening odf, but not saving them.

Kplato vs TaskJuggler

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a great news. I like KDE a lot, way better than XP.

Am curious though how Kplato compares to TaskJuggler.

Re:Kplato vs TaskJuggler

[cmbofh]

Not an answer to your question, but interesting in this context:
I hear KPlato will switch to the taskjuggler engine.

Why I'm using KOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running Debian Sarge, so my version of KOffice is a bit dated compared to the bleeding edge out there. But the version that made it into Sarge is good enough.

I had previously shied away from KOffice/Kword because although the earlier versions offered the ability to save/print to pdf file, the pdf file it created sometimes wasn't compatible with Acroread or Windows or even OO.org. So when creating docs with earlier versions of KWord, just to be sure, I'd save the file as ps, then open a shell and use ps2pdf to convert, and everything worked ok. In order to avoid that, as OO.org hit 1.1.x then 1.2.x then 1.3.x, I started using OO.org more and more, especially because its export to pdf button worked flawlessly every time. Still does. But events have conspired to bring me back into the KOffice fold.

OO.org is just too resource intensive. When I need to create a short document, if kword/kate or vim aren't good enough for lack of features, I found myself trying to think of alternatives rather than fire up OO.org and watch it eat up memory and slow everything down. So I apt-get installed KOffice again after purging it, and installed all the KOffice related recommends/suggests, and found that it had advanced enough to the point of my liking it. That's a change because just a few versions back I was really disappointed in the pdf problem, the limited number of other file formats it was capable of saving to with those formats being compatible with the same formats on other applications, etc.

Now, the number one reason I'm using KOffice almost exclusively is because I can't print from OO.org, Mozilla/Firefox, or some other applications. I have an HP4+ printer plugged via parallel port into a knoppix desktop running from the CD drive. It's running cupsd, and I'm printing either directly from the knoppix desktop, or printing from other desktops logged into the file server via ssh, using the identities on the file server. Previously, I had an Epson ink jet printer plugged into the knoppix via cupsd, but changed the printer to the HP a while back. Changed the configurations in cupsd and cups in /etc on the knoppix acting as the print server, plus the desktop cups clients. KWord, and all the KDE apps picked up the change, correctly showing the HP and being able to print to the HP after I added the HP via the cups administration interface and checking the config files as needed. But OO.org and Mozilla and Firefox all show the old setup and I'm unable to print from them because they aren't showing/connecting to HP printer via cups. They show the old Epson printer, and the settings that I added for another printer (just testing) when the Epson was still hooked up.

I went to the OO.org site and followed the how-to for setting up a printer, but I still couldn't get it to work. It was a while ago, but I think I also went to the Firefox site to look for help, and went through the Mozilla/Firefox help menus to try and find help, but I still can't print from OO.org, Firefox, and now that I think about it, Acroread and possibly xpdf as well.

So I think I'm missing an entry in another config file where OO.org and Firefox and Xpdf and other non-kde apps look for info on what printers are available. Luckily, kde apps are using some other method to list available printers, so if I need to create something in OO.org, I reopen it in Kword or create a pdf and print it through kword or kpdf. If I have a web page opened in Firefox or Mozilla that I need to print, I have to re-open the page in Konqueror before I can print it.

As long as my situation lasts, I'm hoping that KOffice gets better and better before Etch hits stable, and continues to get better after that. I'm semi-hooked and getting in deeper as time passes.

Re:Why I'm using KOffice

[Maltheus]

Google "openoffice kprinter". You can print from those apps, using the KDE print manager. I just don't like doing it that way. But I feel your pain.

Re:Why I'm using KOffice

[frogstar_robot]

I had previously shied away from KOffice/Kword because although the earlier versions offered the ability to save/print to pdf file, the pdf file it created sometimes wasn't compatible with Acroread or Windows or even OO.org.

I'm running on Ubuntu Dapper and had EXTREME problems creating non-broken pdfs. It turns out that the culprit was gs-esp. In /etc/alternatives, I renamed the old gs->/usr/bin/gs-esp symlink to gs.old and made a new gs symlink that points gs->/usr/bin/gs-gpl. That fixed pdf creation across a whole range of apps and I'm still able to print to the postscript laser printers I'm using.

Ironically, recent versions of Scribus insist on the latest gs-esp builds to "support advanced pdf features". I don't see the point of advanced pdfs that bomb out in anything but gv.

Re:Why I'm using KOffice

[Bronster]

You may find it more future-safe to use the utilities your distribution provided for managing alternative implementations of a tool. Thanks for the tip though, as you can see below, I've just tried switching myself. Dapper installed gs-esp by default. I'm just blabbing on here to get the junk count down because slashdot really doesn't seem to like the detail below much - I'm so lame, obviously. I've also removed a whole bunch of punctuation from the output of update-alternatives below. Sorry about that. There should be enough for you to see what it does though...

sudo update-alternatives --config gs

There are 2 alternatives which provide gs.

Selection Alternative
*+ 1 /usr/bin/gs-esp
2 /usr/bin/gs-gpl

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 2
Using /usr/bin/gs-gpl to provide gs.

Re:Why I'm using KOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote the parent post. I'm sending you a huge thank you for your post. Not only did I get OpenOffice and Acroreader and Firefox working through kprinter, but in fiddling with individual users' kdeprintrc and konquerorrc config files, I've been able to get other user accounts to be able to print as well, something I wasn't able to do earlier and was attributing to the non-standard way I had set up cupsd, and thinking it was a permission/groups problem.

Thanks to your hint, I now have a networked printer. Now if I could just figure out how to remove the HP from the parallel port and get it to work through its ethernet card...

another day, another day to play with Debian. Thanks to you though, today is a happy, happy day compared to the frustrating days I've had trying to get printing to work, and then on shuffling files between OOo or Acroread or Firefox, to Konqueror or other KDE apps just to get them to print. Not fun, especially when in a hurry.

Thanks again!

Try OO.org 2.0

[linuxkrn]

That is in OO.org 2.0+, so you'll have to wait until you can use the 2.0 version to get ODF in OO.org

Who is the bigger fool

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is the bigger fool, the idiot or the one who taunts them?

Re: Who is the bigger fool

[nurb432]

The idiot. The one who taunts gets pleasure out of it at the idiots expense.

And remember, its all about me anyway.

Moderators suck.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not worthy to enter it.

Kexi is available on MS Windows since 2004

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.kexi.pl/wiki/index.php/Kexi_for_MS_Wind ows

Paid support is available for commercial versions.

Yup

[Anonymous Coward]

I also like KWord 1.4 but wow the printing can look BAD. I have no idea why this is, but OOo is definitely better.

I'm looking forward to trying KOffice 1.5, although it looks like that won't be in Suse 10.1, which is coming out any day now.

Looks like Suse 10.2 is going to be a good step for me: Koffice 1.5 and GCC 4.2 probably.

Did you flunk math?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

There are a heck of a lot more of them then there are of you.

( Classification of the author is uncertain, pending the completion of his Operating System To End All Operating Systems (OSTEAOS) pronounced (aws-TEA-os) (patent pending)).

Re:Did you flunk math?

[BlueLightning]

You missed the point, which is that it's not the naming scheme that's keeping more people from using these applications - otherwise the similar naming schemes used by Windows and Mac applications would be driving people away as well. A small minority seem to be hung up on the naming issue, however in my experience most of the people who complain about the naming don't have any interest in actually using the applications themselves, so it's not really a big problem.

Of course, Kexi is available on Windows since 2004

[jstaniek]

See http://www.kexi.pl/wiki/index.php/Kexi_for_MS_Wind ows

(with commercial tech support)

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[bipolarpinguino]

Wait... are you trying to say that you changed your whole desktop environment because you did not like its naming scheme. I'm sure there are many valid reasons (I have yet to come across any, mind you) for using gnome over kde, but the preference of 'g' over 'k' is not one of them.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[eldepeche]

I think you're overlooking the fact that "Snakes On A Plane" is the best movie title since caveman times.

Re:Stop trying

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

Not only is KOffice older than OpenOrifice.Org, it's better.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[kbperry]

To me the K is fine, but some of the Linux application names are just dumb. Take Pico, GIMP, and GAIM. Who would of thought that they are a text editor, image editor, and IM apps, respectively? Certainly not me, and according to usability studies not by many other users either. Personally, I like good software products. I don't care if it can be run on Windows or Linux. Although, Linux wouldn't be where it is today without its user interface, and that is of course, how Windows became so popular. According to HCI principles, people tend to recognize over recall, and so if Linux still keeps using stupid names like these, then it will continue to have usability problems. For the Linux users that say, well its an "expert" interface, and we like it that way, then quit complaining when Microsoft dominates the market with Windows. Linux will only become more dominate with a better UI, and so far they are playing catch up.

Native KDE Apps are just better

[Xedium]

Personally, I use OO.o, and I will definitely try KOffice when it gets ported to kubuntu. I just like native KDE apps better, and that's the part I hate about Linux. I have to deal with a multitude of different save boxes, fonts, colors, widgets, menus, shortcuts, EVERYTHING, when different programs use different toolkits. It sucks that GAIM and Mozilla Thunderbird, two of my favorite apps, are GTK based. When I use them I always feel that I'm getting a lower level of usability, because everything works differently. My favorite distro only ships GNOME-based free CDs, so I can't introduce KDE to my friends. Can't we all just get along?

Re:Native KDE Apps are just better

[penguin-collective]

Funny, I thought it sucked that Konqueror and KOffice are Qt based--they never look right on a Gnome desktop, and they print all this crap when they start up.

Re:Native KDE Apps are just better

[ingwa]

Kubuntu was one of the first distros to release KOffice 1.5 packages. In fact they were available already at the release moment. Just see the announcement for links, or go to kubuntu.org.

Re:Native KDE Apps are just better

[Elektroschock]

Why do you use a Gnome desktop?

Re:Native KDE Apps are just better

[angulion]

Why do you use a KDE desktop?

I use Gnome too and don't like KDE that much.. The good thing is that everyone is able to choose what pleases him/her. More power to all. :)

It is true though that the differences are a bit annoying from time to time. Fortunatly almost the only KDE app I use is K3b.

iReadme

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is different from Apple's naming scheme how? iTunes, iPod, iLife, etc. Apple seems to be doing quite well, and people like their products.

Itunes
Ipod
Ilife

The lowercase "i" is iNvisible, compared to the Klunky replace-first-letter-with-capital-K (Konqeror, Konsole, Karbon) or preface-word-with-caps-K (KWrite, KWord, KSpread) methods. I find it a real usability issue.

Since apps using the latter method all read as K-space-Product, I can't imagine why a little whitespace isn't added to make those menus a little more human-readable. Presumably there are people fighting a holy war somewhere on Usenet about this? A more elegant solution might be to make the K in KDE (and therefore everything belonging to it) lowercase, but I'd have to mod myself Flamebait if I seriously suggested that one.

Man, I really earnt my Anonymous Coward label today.

Re:iReadme

[Grishnakh]

A more elegant solution might be to make the K in KDE (and therefore everything belonging to it) lowercase,

Sounds fine to me, but I imagine it'd be kind of hard to convince every K project to change their name. Inertia can be difficult to overcome.

MS Word import quality?

[pavon]

A question for those of you that use KWord heavily - How does the MS Word import compare to open office? About the same? More limited? Better perhaps?

I have been using Open Office, and would like to ditch it, in part because it is too resource intensive (even with java disabled), but also because the .doc import feature is less exact than I need. Don't get me wrong, it does import just about every part of every document I read, and renders it pretty close to the way that MS does, which is very impressive given how horrible that file format is. However, for WYSIWYG programs, rendering things "pretty close" to the same often isn't good enough.

In particular it renders all the fonts slightly larger than Word does. This means that documents are often paginated differently that the original - a big problem when someone is trying to refer to information on a certain page of a manual. It means that documents that expect a line of text to fit on the page often don't, causing unacceptable wrapping. A large percentage of the Word documents I deal with are flyers and forms, where WYSIWYG is essential, and I have to end up reformating nearly all of them before converting to PDF to post on our (a non-profit's) website. If KWord is better at this, then I will be installing KDE pronto.

Re:MS Word import quality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you're using OpenOffice.org 1 or don't have the MS Core Fonts installed. Try OO.o2 and install the MS Core Fonts (Times New Roman, Verdana, Arial, blahblah).

Re:MS Word import quality?

[The Cisco Kid]

The people creating flyers and forms in a Word Processor (or at the very least, sending them to you in a Word Processor format) are idiots. If you cant get them to use something more appropriate, at least point them at the (free) methods of producing a PDF directly. Or heck, have them install a 'generic postscript printer' with print-to-file setup, and send you that, which ps2pdf will handle trivially.

Re:MS Word import quality?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just tried importing from m$ word and ooo2 writer and impress (presentation thingy). THe ooo2 text (.odt) was a very simple thing and it worked OK. Both m$Word .doc's I've tried were messily displayed; one had lost the images within. Both .docs work fine with ooo2.

As for the ooo2 presentation it was a horrible, horrible mess in koffice. Too bad; I would've loved to ditch OOo for something smaller/better/64bit-capable.

N.B. this was ubuntu hoary with koffice 1.5 installed from the respective koffice repository. YMMV.

Err...?

[Keichann]

> I wouldn't be suprised if I saw

Okay so far...

> Althougth [sic] I don't think it'll ever happen

Blown it.

Linux vs Windows naming

[mopslik]

To me the K is fine, but some of the Linux application names are just dumb. Take Pico, GIMP, and GAIM. Who would of thought that they are a text editor, image editor, and IM apps, respectively?

You're right. Applications should have clear and consise names that reflect what they do, like Microsoft Excel...

Certainly not me, and according to usability studies not by many other users either.

The GIMP's name affects its usability? I assumed the less-than-stellar UI was what causes issues, not some silly name. I guess that's why the iPod was so unsuccessful too, since you can't tell it's a music player from its name.

Linux wouldn't be where it is today without its user interface, and that is of course, how Windows became so popular.

The one "borrowed" from Apple/Xerox?

For the Linux users that say, well its an "expert" interface

By "Linux" I assume you mean KDE, or Gnome, or XFCE, or TWM, or any number of window managers or desktop environments that run atop the kernel. Of course, you can choose whichever interface is most appropriate to your tastes/tasks: KDE gives you immense customization ala Windows, GNOME strives to keep things simpler, etc.

Linux will only become more dominate with a better UI

I fail to see how KDE or GNOME will ultimately fail in this respect, with my preference going to the former. But YMMV.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Secrity]

Who would think that Outlook would be a mail and calendar client, or that Excel was a spreadsheet program? I am not sure about Exchange, it might be some sort of telephone app, perhaps VoIP. How intuitive are the names "Visual Studio" or ".net"?

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Millenniumman]

K names like KOffice aren't that bad. They make it clear what the software does. It's Ubuntu, GIMP, etc. that seem like bad names to me. Not only do they have no relation to the software, but they aren't words. I sort of like iNames better than k/gNames only because i somehow seems better. The non-i OS X applications have very good names in my opinion.

LyX

[gatzke]

Look into LyX for real document processing. Great LaTeX front end, export to PS, pdf, html. Use all of the background of LaTeX.

I have written numerous papers, a thesis, and multiple books using it and they are all typeset quality.

Sorta a pain for simple stuff, the only way for complex stuff.

Re:LyX

[hey!]

I like the Lyx philosophy in theory, but it definitely works better for the kinds of things you are doing than most business documents. In business, presentation either doesn't matter at all, or it matters a great deal.

Re:LyX

[gatzke]

LaTeX is great for complex documents so it can automatically update bib items, section number references, and equation number references.

Table support is crap. I can't embed a xls into a latex table, that would be very useful.

Image support is great and painful at the same time. EPS looks great, but not everything is an eps.

Equations are beautiful.

I see your point, but for most technical minded students, LaTeX can be a great tool and LyX makes it approachable.

Re:LyX

[colinrichardday]

Have you tried exporting the xls table into Gnumeric?

Re:LyX

[gatzke]

I have not used gnumeric much, but it looks like it may be able to do tables in latex.

I also found a csv2latex application, that would be nice as well.

Thanks!

Re:LyX

[Onymous Hero]

Hey, thanks very much for the info about LyX - I really need something like this right now for my thesis...looks really great.

Re:LyX

[Just Some Guy]

I like LaTeX (but prefer to use Emacs to edit it), to the point that I wrote my resume in it. However, one of my primary uses for a word processor is turning Word docs into hardcopy, and LyX ain't much help there. I guess I could ask our transcriptionist to switch from Word to Lyx, but I won't hold my breath for that to happen.

Re:LyX

[hawk]

I endeed up doing some coversions for this. I want to say that I ened up doing it in vim, but it also could have been some sh scripts to run sed or awk. Probably vim, as I only had a couple of tables, and then a couple more after that.

hawk

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[westlake]

As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "microsoft" or a "i" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Windows and Mac OS zealots (a.k.a. "Least Common Denominator" users).

99% of the market for an office suite. or general productivity apps of any description whatsoever.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[westlake]

And this is different from Apple's naming scheme how? iTunes, iPod, iLife, etc.

The difference is that you can read and talk about Apple's programs without sounding like a pimple-faced nerd rehearsing Klingon speech for a Star Trek costume play.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

I know.NET Its really hard to find what you're looking for because the names make no sense.NET Those OSS programmers sure suck at naming stuff.NET

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Dining Philanderer]

How is this a Troll? I read TFA and went to the website before scrolling down.

The first thing that jumped out at me was 'Man those are some stupid names'...

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[westlake]

It's Ubuntu, GIMP, etc. that seem like bad names to me. Not only do they have no relation to the software, but they aren't words.

The problem is that sometimes they are words: Gimp has a very specific meaning in English. Its usage here looks too much like what passes for Geek humor.

Kerning sucks, but tweaking printing settings help

[Anonymous Coward]

I must confirm the kerning problem, at lest on oSuse 10 and KOffice 1.5 RC1.

However, it really helps to change the printer driver settings.

File > Print > choose "Print to file (PDF)" > press "Properties" buttons.

There go to "Driver Settings" tab and "UP" the settings:
- target device = prepress or printer
- also, see the "Fonts" section for bitmap font resolution.

why kspread sucks

[Arthur B.]

experiment: A0 = 0 An+1 = An + normsinv(rand()) plot A0 to A1000, go get a cup of koffee gnumeric is the only decent excel competitor in that area

Re:why kspread sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Using bar graph, I get a 1s delay for plotting the function, using the line graph I get no visible delay at all.

Re:why kspread sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll have to give KOffice another look. I know that the same thing will bring OO spreadsheet to its knees as well until you remove the X axis labelling.

KDE has the same problem

[penguin-collective]

It's funny that you say that because I see that as a problem with the entire KDE desktop. Qt is a cross-platform toolkit; it ignores large portions of Linux and X11 and instead re-implements them itself. And that's not going to change because Troll Tech is never going to give up cross-platform features--it's their core business.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Products don't need horribly boring, uninspired names like "SQL Server", "Server 2003", "Media Player", etc. in order to be successful.

Unlike the inspired KOffice, KWord, KSpread...

Re:Stop trying

[Anonymous Coward]

Having obviously not used either, I'm not sure you're qualified to say that.

How do I know? The only way what you said could be true, is if you're using "better" to mean "worse".

Now I know "hot" = "cool" and "bad" = "good", but I'm afraid I didn't get the memo where "better" now equals "worse".

This ain't a troll, by the way. KOffice is improving in leaps and bounds, and has lots of promise, but it ain't OO.o yet, not by a long shot.

Re:Stop trying

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice.org is StarOffice which dates back to 1994. Sun bought it in 1999. Therefore OpenOffice.org is much older than KOffice.

No, you missed my point.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

The naming isssue could be very real, but the number of people who trust anything with i, or windows in front of a product vastly outnumbers those that do not.

But you now seem to be simply saying that there are many names for products that have prefixes to them that do not scare customers away. I think its a trust issue. Most people will (unwisely inthe case of microsoft) trust something made by those companies and so the prefix is part of the branding and attracts people to it. In theory, the same labeling should work in linux, but the product names out of context if you are just talking about a single application (ie a potential user is told that they can use k-word and they don't know that kde is a graphical desktop of a good reputation and that k-word is created by the like minded individuals.) I guess the big diffference besides recognition of the brands is that you have a lot more brands to be concious of in the linux world ( you have to know what gnome and kde are and why there are the choice between them, a choice that was not neccisary to make in either Mac or windows world)).

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[cpm8080]

You're right. I guess I was not very clear. I switched from KDE to gnome not because of the k prefix alone. KDE was good to support my migration from windows to linux. KDE was very much like windows 2000 and I did not get lost much. Once I got familiar with linux, I found that I liked gnome better. Somehow the application naming makes more sense to me. I'm telling ya, since I switched from Fedora 4/KDE to Ubuntu Breezy/gnome I've been more productive. I'll check KDE from time to time but, right now, I'm good with gnome.

Re:But it still can't print! --- and its slow

[Patrik Arvhult]

And, also, for me it seems to print enormous slow compared to oo. /P

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[10Ghz]

How about apps like F-spot (where does that name come from? A joke on G-spot? Yeah, very funny. In junior high), Sabayon, Ekiga and the like. Yes, those are all GNOME-apps. For some reason, GNOME-guys seem to be hell-bent on giving their apps the weirdest names possible.

Tested TeXShop for OSX

[zoloto]

I have tested TeXShop for OS X found here: http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/ and I really enjoy it. You can use it to write in (La)TeX without having to use Terminal.app and can have it show the output (in pdf) at a given moment if you desire to "see" what it would look like.

I'll give it a 4 out of 5 stars - but thats' only because I haven't been exposed to other Mac native LaTeX programs. I would encourage everyone to try it out.

Re:Stop trying

[Anonymous Coward]

Expensive Typewriter was writen in the 1960's So we should all be using that, right?

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[TeknoHog]

Oh so using Windows makes me part of the Least Common Denominator guys, great. Where's the holy temple I can praise you, oh almighty Linux user?

Here.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[tokyopimpdaddy]

Just a note; GIMP is an acronym that happens to be a word. Ubuntu I believe is an 'African' work. It's a little dangerous to assume any word that isn't recogniseable as an English word isn't a real word.

As for product names, I think people should name then what they like. How uninteresting is the Toyota SUV, Nissan SUV, GM SUV; Microsoft Word Processor Corel Word Processor?

Did you flunk English?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its 'maths' not 'math' you dumbfuck

Live CD/DVD?

[ThePhilips]

Is there any Live CD/DVD with KO/1.5?

I have checked Kubuntu - they have already packages, but no live cd/dvd yet.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[caffeination]

More accurate would have been to call Windows itself the lowest common denominator system. But that wouldn't have fit into his point, which was otherwise insightful.

And yes, using Windows does make you a part of that user group. It labels you as similar to the AOL grannies, the gamers, the script kiddies, the warez crowd... just as using Linux labels me as similar to the FSF disciples, the sandals-and-ponytail hackers, and the Gentoo ricers. Labels are dumb and mostly meaningless, but that doesn't make them incorrect as the general grouping terms that they are. People tend to take and use them as insults, so for the sake of my own peace of mind, the first thing I do when one enters my brain is to chmod -x its ass.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[caffeination]

This is one of those easy but ego-hurting kchanges they kould make in an kinstant, with few real technical konsequences.

For a while now, I've been kseriously konsidering setting up a kampaigny site like knames.org or some such, where I would have a database of bad KDE app names, along with suggested changes, and maybe a wiki for initial input of user-contributed names.

While end kusers have no right to tell kdevelopers how to name their work, I think that in a "Desktop Environment", it bekomes a kusability issue. KDE isn't known for karing about kusability, but when the required kwork can be done by shell scripts and regexes, what's the kexcuse?

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[10Ghz]

Yep, I know that the names I listed (apart from F-spot) are actual words, as is GIMP. But they should still reconsider the names. Just because it means "something" in some weird (more or less) language, does not mean that it's a good name for generam use. And GIMP is just plain BAD. What on EARTH were they thinking?!?

Re:But it still can't print (use Type 1 Fonts)!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. I have fought with that ever since I started trying to use KWord, and I finally got it working the other day. The secret:

DO NOT USE MICROSOFT TRUETYPE FONTS.

(until the next Qt4 based release)

I installed a selection of Type 1 fonts and its been great.

The only thing that sucks is that unless you have very high screen resolution smaller pt sizes look very good on screen (turning on anti-aliasing helps a lot). They always print fine though as printers have very high dpi.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[richlv]

gompletely

Re:But it still can't print! (font emedding)

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten to one says one of you have font embedding turned on and the other does not (system options -> fonts under the kprinter dialogue).

The problem is that Qt (KWord or KDE -- whatever is doing it) does a really bad job at converting TT fonts to Type 1 fonts for embedding in ps/pdf documents.

If you turn off embedding, your ps/pdf view will use the original fonts, and you sidestep around the problem. Better yet, just use Type 1 fonts to start with (Windows actually substitutes printer Type 1 fonts for TT fonts when printing)!

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Ubuntu, GIMP, etc. that seem like bad names to me. Not only do they have no relation to the software, but they aren't words.

Ubuntu is a word, it just happens to be a word from the Bantu languages of southern Africa. Surely that's reasonable, especially for a South Africa-based distro.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[ablaze]

Actually your comment is very Euro- or American- centric. And it's a shame!

Ubuntu _is_ a word indeed. It's Swahili for "humanity".

To quote http://www.learning-org.com/97.05/0042.html:

"A literal translation of the word 'ubuntu' would be 'humanity'. Old
dictionaries will show that the word humanity in English had a very rich
meaning: 1 humans collectively, 2 human nature, 3 human quality, 4
educated, 5 civilised, 6 humane and dignified. But as the information
overload increases, the richness of the word has immerged in the ascending
order. The pollution of information leads to the trivialisation of
knowledge. Now only meaning 1 probably survives. However, the word
'ubuntu' still has all six meanings in ascending order of emergent
importance! The deepest or highest meaning of ubuntu is thus to become
humane while behaving with dignity. Let us not pollute and thus trivialise
this word ubuntu!"

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[NMikkila]

F-spot is a nice anagram of f-stop.

word2tex and tex2word

[gatzke]

Try word2tex and tex2word. They work great for text formatting, equations, relational links, and bibitems (copy bbl file into .tex file if you use bibtex).

Tables and figures stink for me, but it could be my use of LyX rather than plain old latex. Have not really worried too much on that end.

Chibarti software, like $90 for both but you need mathtype as well for equations. It has saved ma a lot of time reformatting stuff.

http://www.chikrii.com/

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[bortizc]

a name is a name.
software names have always been arbitrary. Even so since the seventies. As everyone has pointed out MS names and i names are equally arbitrary. Perhaps backed up by a more efficient marketing machine. But there is something I particularily enjoy in GNU/linux and Unix names: humor. Something that even people in att/bell labs afforded (for example: more and less). This humorous approach to naming relates to the way you name your tools, and speaks of coding as a loving craft. I might sound a little hippie, but I feel sometimes the attitude towards computer software gets too serious in areas where it doesn't need to be serious. Tex error messages are sometimes very funny + intelligent.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[JabberWokky]

More on-topic, Kubuntu means "towards humanity" in Bemba.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[hazah]

Dude, you're using Windows. You admitted it. You have no ammo. :)

Followup with more examples

[Just Some Guy]

First, I made sure that I disabled embedded fonts in qtconfig, the print window's "System Options", and in the "Print to File"'s "Driver Settings" tab. Second, I loaded an old school paper. Finally, I noticed that the resulting PDF looks nothing like the on-screen display: the kerning is beyond horrible, and the typeface is not Times New Roman, or even serif.

To complicate matters, if I send it directly to the printer without going through the PDF stage first, it looks different from either of the other two. It uses the same (sans-serif) font as the PDF version but actually has decent kerning this time. I guess that means that disabling the embedded fonts is a step in the right direction, as long as I can figure out which font I should choose to make the end results look something like people expect.

So very close, but still not quite there...

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[Millenniumman]

I knew Ubuntu was a word, and was under the impression it is the name of a humanist ideology. It's not a word that most Ubuntu Linux users would recognize otherwise. It has very little to do with what Ubuntu Linux is. I'll admit it probably sounds weird to me because of where I live, but if it was named "Humanity" I'd like it less.

Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme

[angulion]

Do you mean dumb in the same sense that Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Winamp, AIM and ICQ gives away what they do? Noone knows those either?

With regards to UI (GUI), at least I find that Linux becomes more and more consistent all the tim, while the reverse seems to be true for Windows. Seems all MS Offices uses different toolkits, half of the 3rd party apps want to "differentiate themselves" and thus look different and what is worse, behaves differently (titlebar menu missing standard stuff for example).