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

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.

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: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.

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!

[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: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.

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

[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.

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

[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!

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: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: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: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.

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: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.