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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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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.
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.
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.