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.

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.

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: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.