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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."
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.
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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.
the pdfs that I export with koffice look exactly like the document on the screen, you should be able to print those anywhere.
me fail english? thats unpossible
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.
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.
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.
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.
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It will when version 2.0 (built on KDE 4 and Qt4) comes out.
Natively, through QT4. No X server, but not on Aqua.
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
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.
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.
I think I need a new sig here.
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).
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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".
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).
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.
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).
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".
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."
It's not too difficult to make a LaTeX stylesheet to satisfy your university's dissertation-formatting requirements.
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!
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.