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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 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.
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.
iAgree.
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.
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?
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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).
As long as they keep giving their software stupid names by sticking a "microsoft" or a "i" on the front of it this software will never appeal to anyone but the Windows and Mac OS zealots (a.k.a. "Least Common Denominator" users).
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.
Congrats on the release, but I have to say that OO.o still is the leader in OSS office suites.
Well, as long as they're properly compatible - pick the one that suits your personal preference. Or even the right tool for the right task, if one does something well that the other doesn't (or not at all). I'm perfectly happy that Firefox is more popular than Opera (my preference), because if you've built a site to work in one it's 99% sure to work in the other.
If we see competition on features rather than on format and compatibility, nothing is better than that in my opinion. If it isn't clear what I mean by that, let's for the moment assume that one of them offered regex search & replace, and the other did not. The results, before and after are both valid ODF documents - the difference is how you get there. Same with layout, which offers good layout management? Spell check and grammar?
Besides, I think the only way to have a format implemented according to spec is to have at least two implementations. They're sure to run into many of the other's bugs resulting in better standards compliance to benefit all. In short, I don't care if OpenOffice is "leading", I think "local competition" is just as excellent as motivator as the big competition against MS Office.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
People are a bit confused about this "KOffice is only KDE" business.
A modern office suite needs to build on top of a really solid foundation in terms of widgets and supporting library.
OpenOffice (and StarOffice before it) chose to design everything from scratch. Every menu, every window, every pixel is hand-drawn by the program itself. They have a very powerful toolkit in VCL which DUPLICATES all that a toolkit should do. They coded all their dialogs from scratch, font handling from scratch, print support from scratch. Skins and themes - from scratch.
Basically, OpenOffice folks wrote half an operating system to make their office suite. Mozilla did something very similar. And then people wonder where the bloat is coming from!
There is another way to write applications. You look around, and see that there is a very very powerful library foundations out there. You get menus for free. Dialogs. Font handling. Network transparency. Buttons. Canvas. Printing. Image input/output. Sound. This set of libraries is called KDE, although you could use GNOME to a similar extent.
Why on Earth should KOffice people reinvent the wheel yet another time, when there is a very powerful library that does all of this already?
If you download OpenOffice.org, in its 300 MB, you download a whole toolkit plus half an operating system in bloat.
If you download KOffice, just download kdelibs while you're at it. You don't need the rest of KDE! Just look at it as another library providing functionality.
We shouldn't go back in time and recode each menu pixel-for-pixel in every single application. StarOffice did this out of legacy reasons and now we're stuck with it. But in this day and age, people use libraries which take care of this stuff, so you can concentrate on functionality.
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.
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.