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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."
I AM A FISH!
The open source world doesn't need more office suites. Everyone should work on OpenOffice.org and make it better. Unity is strength.
I bet that's klingon for something.
K'Platoh!
Slagborr
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.
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).
I'm thinking that deep down inside the open source movement doesn't really want to become mainstream or appeal to the Joe Sixpacks in the world for fear of losing their perceived superiority.
Im running ooo in windows, now that ko is compatible with ooo, can I run it in here? :D
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 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.
$sig$
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.
Starting everything with a K is so alienating. Grow a brain morans.
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!
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
READY.
#
>>This makes KOffice a member of a very select group
But will it run on Windows?!??!?
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
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?
The problem with your idea is that it makes sense.
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.
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.
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
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.
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.
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).
Slashdot is great, as long as the $x fanboys don't catch you saying anything negative about $x.
1. Industry buzz
2. Being ridiculously slow
Anyone else tired of these k-trolls everytime a kde announcement is made?
1 - the K makes sence. So you know its a KDE compliant app. How hard is it to understand that.
2 - you are an idiot and need to go away
3 - you are an idiot and need to go away
4 - noone really cares about your opinion, beacuse you are an idiot and need to go away.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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).
Get your own free personal location tracker
That's a great news. I like KDE a lot, way better than XP.
Am curious though how Kplato compares to TaskJuggler.
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.
/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 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
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.
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, the idiot or the one who taunts them?
http://www.kexi.pl/wiki/index.php/Kexi_for_MS_Wind ows
Paid support is available for commercial versions.
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.
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)).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
See http://www.kexi.pl/wiki/index.php/Kexi_for_MS_Wind ows
(with commercial tech support)
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?
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.
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?
.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.
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
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.
> I wouldn't be suprised if I saw
Okay so far...
> Althougth [sic] I don't think it'll ever happen
Blown it.
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.
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.
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.
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
\u262D = \u5350
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.
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)).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
And, also, for me it seems to print enormous slow compared to oo. /P
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.
Its 'maths' not 'math' you dumbfuck
Is there any Live CD/DVD with KO/1.5?
I have checked Kubuntu - they have already packages, but no live cd/dvd yet.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
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)!
Try word2tex and tex2word. They work great for text formatting, equations, relational links, and bibitems (copy bbl file into
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/
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...
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?