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KOffice 1.6 Released
ingwa writes "The KOffice team today released version 1.6 of its office suite. Among other things, this release contains an improved Krita which can now handle color spaces like CMYK. This makes it the only free image editor that can be used in professional pre-press work. Together with the other improvements, this release probably makes it the best free image editor in the world. The release also contains improvements in Kexi, the MS Access like database application, and a new scripting framework which makes it extremely simple to script applications that handle OpenDocument data. With this release KOffice also surpasses OpenOffice.org in some ways, e.g. it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML test suite while Openoffice.org only handles 22%. See the KOffice homepage for more information."
"this release probably makes it the best free image editor in the world"
"With this release KOffice also surpasses OpenOffice.org in some ways, e.g. it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML test suite while Openoffice.org only handles 22%. See the KOffice homepage for more information."
Does anyone smell a marketing rat trying to push new software? Rather interesting post on the heals of post on the GIMP graphics subsystem.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
KOffice has been for a long time the contender that has not gotten its due. Like KDE, it is mildly clunky, but quite powerful, and programming things in the C++/Qt/KDE paradigm makes it faster on its feet than OpenOffice. Qt 4.x should make it possible for this suite to make a splash on Windows and OSX too, so this year should be very... interesting.
Eventhough I still use OO.org 2.0, I've always felt that the codebase has the feel of having been through too many hands, have had too many cooks mix in all their special sauce (*cough* Sun... *cough* Java...), for it to leave a good after taste. But people still work on it and use it because it has the best MS Word .doc compatibility versus esoteric
features like MathML (@see LaTeX) - it is a chicken and egg problem of getting your users/developers and having
work done to get them (@see Hurd).
So, if there were on OO.org, I'd have estimated that Koffice would be much farther up in .doc compatibility than it is now. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I'm not trying to sound stupid here. But what are the chances of getting a gnome version of Koffice? I don't mean a complete rewrite start from scratch office suite tied into the Gnome desktop project. I mean a port of Koffice to a gnome environment.
Is that even possible? It seems kind of dumb to port a linux application to linux.
Perhaps I'm way off base here.
this is a good week(well month, the week ended yesterday.. ;) ) for the K Team, thanks and keep the good job.
PD= aptituding and installing in my new Ubuntu box... yeah!
Well maybe now all those people who go "OOOH gimps not like photoshop" or "Linux image editors suck" can be silenced?
We'd like it to store the image data as CMYK, instead of just letting you pick a colour in CMYK, which it then immediately converts to RGB internally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP
"For the future it is planned to base GIMP on a more generic graphical library called GEGL, thereby addressing some fundamental design limitations that prevent many enhancements such as native CMYK support. However, implementation of this plan has been continually put off since 2000."
An eternity, eh? Apparently CYMK hasn't been in there long enough to get inclusion in the Wikipedia article. Also, are you sure you aren't just using the plugin? http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml
Not quite the same, because you're going to blow through pages getting things looking good. Native CMYK from start to finish means you don't have to do the inevitable tweaks to the document when converting between colorspaces.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I've been a KDE fan ever since Mandrake 8.1, and later Kubuntu 5.10. It would be very elegant to be able to use KWord and the KOffice suite, since it integrates so well, and I can use the KIOslaves and take advantage of all the KDE features, including my favourite, completely configurable key bindings.
Nevertheless, KWord's inability to export to MS Word format is a dealbreaker. Not only don't they have a working MS Word export function, they don't even have a non-working one. They haven't started. There are no plans to do any work at all on exporting to MS Word format in the near future.
I don't have any particular fondness for MS Word, but sometimes you just need to create one when, for example, working with some complete compu-noob who is already approaching the seizure threshold just from trying to understand what a computer is; trying to explain how to convert from ODF might just send him into a coma.
There are several other things that also make KWord hard to use. On my installation of Kubuntu, KWord seems to have a screen-refreshing problem: I page down, then page up, and it just shows a blank page. Scrolling around makes the edges refresh slightly, but otherwise the page stays blank, and I have to jump through hoops to make the words appear again. At first I thought that the words really were erased and I had started to re-type.
KWord has struck me as a "very good idea" with some way to go before the implementation reflects the reality. Unfortunately, "elegant" isn't enough to get my work done, so I reluctantly installed AbiWord --a well-done piece of work, and preferable over OpenOffice v2 simply because of its loading speed if nothing else. (Yes, I know about pre-loading, and I know about disabling Java to make it run faster.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Koffice is optimized for KDE.
Hence things fire in a split second.
So for very quick jobs it can be neat.
OpenOffice takes ages to fire-up add Firefox to the list too.
Now for all you lovers of proprietory and closed-source software,
these guys used to code a neat fast loading Word/Excel alternative:
http://www.softmaker.com/
In KDE, any application can print to PDF, Postscript, and fax. That has been the case for years...
You can even print to PDF and attach the PDF to an email message in one smooth move.
If Janitor in a Drum made a douche, would anybody buy it?
SuSe has it today. So does Kubuntu. Debian will likely get it tomorrow.
:(
We'll probably have it for Fedora next month
If we're lucky!
Oh please, let it have improved font kerning in KWord. T he str ange way it pu ts gaps betwe en words keeps me from using it full time.
It doesn't suprise me that they sidesteped MS Office support. Can you even imagine why it's important at all to support those proprietary formats?
I know interoperability is a key feature, but that's what we have OpenOffice for; KOffice is just trying to be the best office suite that it can be all by itself. It's that kind of focus that gives the project much of its promise. The article mentions that the suite surpasses OO.org and GIMP in many key features. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Also, now that the open document format is becoming more standard (and MS is begrudgingly obeying that standard), KOffice has more room to grow than it did before.
In my opinion, a good word processor/office suite acts as a tool for creation first. It just happens to double as a document viewer and exporter later, but that should not be the primary function.
"KDE on Linux only = nobody cares." Incorrect, though it may not matter to you, it does matter to the people that use it.
I don't have any particular fondness for MS Word, but sometimes you just need to create one when, for example, working with some complete compu-noob who is already approaching the seizure threshold just from trying to understand what a computer is; trying to explain how to convert from ODF might just send him into a coma.
.doc . Word still opens it and the braindead f**kwit in HR is happy and none-the-wiser. (That is, the sort of person who is happy BECAUSE they are not wise. =)
I encounter this when applying for a job where the company insists that my resume be in ".doc format".
In these cases I save my resume in RTF, and rename it as
...as an addendum -- there's also been instances where I've renamed ASCII text files to ".doc" for the sake of people who had no idea what a text file was.
Whenever GNOME or some other X11 environment in sucks less than KDE after I've tried it. That's not the case at this time, nor has it ever been the case since KDE hit 1.0, so I'll continue to use and recommend it.
Ditto on the Kudos!
I've stayed away from the KDE stuff for years. Recently, I've finally decided to switch to a better Linux Mail User Agent, so I finally tried KMail. A great big THANK YOU to the KDE developers!!! This is the closest thing to my dream MUA that I've found. The general design philosophy is just the way it should be. The C++/Qt/KDE paradigm is indeed quite powerful. So much so, that I've started programming in it myself just for fun.
Please keep up the superb work, folks! It is MUCH appreciated.
Your prosumer camera and scanner are not CMYK, which negates "from start" in a lot of cases. In addition, your computer monitor is not CMYK. Any intermediate view sent to a computer monitor will not be CMYK; it'll be a conversion, and conversions tend to be fallible.
Can you even imagine why it's important at all to support those proprietary formats?
... its called the real world. Its out there, somewhere.
Um
*thumbs*
Keep on trucking!
Quack, quack.
And out of curiosity, how many of those jobs where you're asked for resumes in .doc format have you actually gotten?
.doc files in batches looking for specific keywords. You feed into the program the keywords you're looking for, it opens every .doc in the directory you point it at, and it returns a (hopefully) shorter list of the resumes that meet that criteria. Refine the searchwords as needed to create as short a list as needed. Often stuff like "award", and some of the words and titles that appear in the job description they're advertising for. The thing is, such programs are usually not smart enough to read other file formats, and will treat every document as a binary MS Word document. Sending them a plain text file or an RTF document that would open up in MS Word just fine accomplishes nothing if their software doesn't have the smarts to deal with documents that aren't MS Word binary.
I ask, because there's a few tools that HR departments are in love with lately that parse
Sometimes, it isn't some idiot in HR that's in love with MS Word. Sometimes, it's an overworked HR person who is realistically expecting hundreds or even thousands of applications for a single position, and wants to pare down the list of applicants quickly.
As an aside, I use AbiWord. It's free, and it has a passable MS Word import/export facility. It's also got filters for WordPerfect files, which is a major bonus when you're dealing with orgs that prefer that software.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Abiword doesn't really export to doc either, they just save as rtf and give it a .doc extension (see here. KWord can easily save to rtf, and even lists it as "RTF Document (Microsoft Word Compatible)" in the save-as dialog. Maybe you can request that the developers add an option to automatically save as rtf with a doc extension, just like Abiword, although I don't personally consider having to change a document extension manually a "dealbreaker."
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
As I responded to another poster below, AbiWord doesn't export to .doc, they save as rtf with a doc extension (exactly as the parent recommended). Also, KWord can import docs and save to rtf. I have no idea if the import is better/worse than AbiWord or OpenOfice.org, but I would suspect that they are all very similar.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
As an aside, I use AbiWord. It's free, and it has a passable MS Word import/export facility.
a qMicrosoftWordDocuments
.doc extension. (...) There are no plans to support binary MS Word export."
And out of curiosity, how many of those jobs where you created your resume in Abiword have you actually gotten?
I think you should read this (as already posted by someone else): http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/F
"AbiWord can currently save in an MS Word compatible ".doc" format. This is done by saving as Rich Text Format (.rtf) but with a
The one thing I really miss about Linux (besides Grep... and skill... and alt-get... and perl that works) is Kmail. I remember hearing from a developer a while back that the port to QT 4 on the 2.0 branch was going to allow for a Windows compatible version.
Does anybody know if this is still the plan? I'd love to move back to Koffice.
The ______ Agenda
CYMK is a device-specific color space. Normally, it should be produced by your printer driver. You certainly don't have a CYMK monitor for editing. CYMK is also ambiguous; there are multiple ways to represent a color. There are two legit ways to deal with CYMK:
Method one is RGB. Don't whine about the gamut, because there is wide-gamut RGB. Probably the nicest way to deal with this is an RGB consisting of the sRGB primaries as linear floating-point values. Things that would normally be out-of-gamut for sRGB can be represented by numbers outside of the normal 0 to 1 range. For normal editing, this method is superior.
Method two is spot colors. You edit the color channels individually. You see them in greyscale unless you supply a profile for CMYK-to-RBG conversion. Editing tools know nothing of the color; they ONLY operate on individual channels. This method is normally lame, but it does let you use weird stuff like a gold-green sparkly ink for your money-making operations.
For prepress work, the GIMP's real limitations are:
1. only 8-bit channels
2. most code is ignorant of gamma
CMYK as an editing format is normally very wrong. If you use spot colors, then maybe WITH DEVICE PROFILES it is reasonable to do some work using the color channels individually. Don't ever get the idea of painting in CMYK, which is as defective as saving your temporary work files in highly-compressed JPEG.
The other thing you need for prepress work is a proper RGB-to-CMYK output conversion. This is specific to your press, ink, paper, and other conditions. You should expect your vendors to provide you with a decent conversion. For an excellent conversion, you will need to measure the expected press/ink/paper setup yourself.
Note: if you worked in CMYK, you'd need a CMYK-to-CMYK conversion! Your press output will vary based on the ink and paper you use. It may vary with other factors, such as the humidity at which you stored the paper. So don't imagine that CMYK would let you get away without conversion. It just makes things worse.
It's really the 8-bit channels and gamma fuckups that make the GIMP unacceptable, but you made things much worse by falling for the CMYK myth.
With this release KOffice also surpasses OpenOffice.org in some ways, e.g. it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML test suite while Openoffice.org only handles 22%.
Any other pointless areas in which KOffice surpasses OpenOffice?
You're really bringing everybody down by getting into that whole "reality" mess. People have gotten very used to proclaiming they're "pros" who've no, really, actually tried the Gimp and supporting that obviously specious claim with the "I can't use it because it doesn't do CMYK" line; you're totally blowing their cover. Stop it, k? Cause really, noone needs to know they really live in mom's basement and make their meager income with a paper route, and besides, what did they ever do to you?
FYI OpenOffice.org 2.2 is pretty fast. Google for 2.2's optimisation videos
Yeah? Well Emacs is at version 22!
A significant amount of the development effort towards openoffice has been wasted reverse engineering microsoft's proprietary formats...\
Had a complete open spec for these formats been available, implementing of them would have been a lot quicker and all that development effort could have gone towards improving the suite as a whole.
KOffice tries to be the best it can, and therefore they're not wasting development time trying to reverse engineer a soon to be obsoleted file format.
In the mean time, you can use openoffice to convert to/from proprietary microsoft formats, and it does a much better job of reading/writing word files than ms publisher does (go figure)
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Uhm... where can I download it? :-) I mean, the latest version is 2.0.4.
``KOffice also surpasses OpenOffice.org in some ways, e.g. it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML''
Yeah, like anybody uses that.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
``it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML test suite''
/ mn><mfrac><mn>1</mn><mn>4</mn></mfrac></math> people cheer.
I do believe I just heard <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mn>5<
And you have no idea how painful that was to type in.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's mostly the same code. KWord and Abiword used to collaborate on a .doc import library. At a certain point we agreed to a version 2 of that library. However, only KWord actually started using it, while Abiword decided to continue with version 1. No doubt we all had our good reasons, but it's a bit sad nonetheless. The WordPerfect import library is more succesful: that is shared between OO, Abiword and KWord.
KOffice's file format is documented {it's actually the same as OpenOffice's file format}, and in fact the actual source code used to put together and take apart its documents is readily available -- with no obligations, except that you must respect the authors' wishes for it to remain Open Source. If Microsoft don't want to use it, that's hardly the KDE team's fault.
Imagine a conversation like this:
Electricity board: We can supply you 230 volts, 50 cycles a second.
Customer: But I want 110 volts, 16.7 cycles!
Electricity board: What for?
Customer: Home-made kit. Can't tell you any more than that -- it's a secret.
Electricity board: Home-made? Well, why on earth didn't you ask what we supplied before you built anything to plug into it?
Customer: I have standardised on 110 volts, 16.7 cycles. I chose some very nice, expensive power transformers, but they are wound for a 110 volt supply. And I designed all my timing circuits to expect 1000 positive-going pulses per minute, which is 16.7 cycles a second.
Electricity board: But why?
Customer: Well, everyone else is using 230/50. I don't want to be like everyone else!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I think the deal breaker is actually the features that won't be saved. Wordart, tables with complex properties and cell layouts, are but a few features that can be saved in an .ODF or a .DOC but not in an .RTF.
Nevertheless, KWord's inability to export to MS Word format is a dealbreaker. Not only don't they have a working MS Word export function, they don't even have a non-working one. They haven't started. There are no plans to do any work at all on exporting to MS Word format in the near future.
.doc functions is of the type "If you have not used features X,Y,Z then this probably works, but you should open in MS Office to be sure" then I'd rather save it as a PDF for read-only or find a machine with MS Office that I know will work (version issues aside). Perhaps they could wrap OpenOffice's export filter somehow? After all, they should be the same "take ODF document, return MS Word document" function. And whatever OpenOffice doesn't support or their export filter doesn't support, KOffice can simply shrug and say "Too bad, but it's exactly the same in OpenOffice."
For a very basic version there's RTF, for everything else... well, ODF supports a whole lot of things that DOC doesn't, or at least there's no easy conversion. If the save to
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Damn... I wish they had prebuilt SuSe 10.0 binaries. Hate it when binaries are only for one year old distro versions.
On the same subject, does anyone know when this will be fixed in Abiword? Other than that it's a decent word processor. E ver yt hing jus tlook s ver y un profe ssion al.
Still, KOffice isn't really an option for me since it's not cross platform. I'll have to stick with OpenOffice for now. Hopefully with KDE 4 and KOffice 2 they'll add support for MacOSX (please, no X11) and Windows.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
None... but then, I haven't actually applied to any. My sister-in-law's mother works in HR, and she's the one that told me about the software. Me, I'm one of those rare lucky SOB's who loves their job, gets a raise every year, lots of advancement opportunities, and works in an industry where there's no chance of ever getting laid off or downsized (they can fire me, but it's a meritocracy and they would only do that if I fucked up royally). Actually, the way things are going these days, it's a growth industry....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Take a look here --> http://kubuntu.org/announcements/koffice-16.php
/etc/sources.list :
- 1.6.0/kubuntu dapper mainb /kde/stable/koffice-1.6.0/kubuntu dapper mainf ice-1.6.0/kubuntu dapper main
or, add these to you
* deb ftp://bolugftp.uni-bonn.de/pub/kde/stable/koffice
* deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.kde.org/pu
* deb http://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde/stable/kof
* deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/koffice-16 dapper main
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Most office versions only go up to ten. Once you are at ten, where can you go? Nowhere! But if you need that little extra, with MS Office, you can go one more.
Yay!! Another half-baked, not-ready-for-primetime piece of OSS software!! Yippee!! Where do I sign up?!!
Seriously, OSS developers need to create a real alternative to non-free products if they really want to gain converts. And, "It isn't MS." doesn't cut it in the real world. Most people just want their software to work and don't have the motivation of an anti-MS agenda to fuel the learning process that is required to jump from a fully-baked piece of software to one that isn't.
Xnview is cross-platform and is virtually equivalent to Irfanview, at least on Windows. (There have been some comments around the net to the effect that the Linux version lacks a few features present on the Windows version.) It is free as in beer, but not free as in speech.
Binary .rpm's are available (presumably for Fedora) here. I found a useful thread on installing Xnview on Ubuntu here.
They can look, EXACTLY (pixel for pixel) the same, because GTK+ uses Qt themes.
This plugin is already in Gimp and it's not enough. It just lets you export 4 layers that represent CMYK.
You shouldn't use past tense :-) Early next week, there will be public betas of TextMaker 2006 for Linux and PlanMaker 2006 for Linux.
Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
"You'd like the bottons reversed? No, yes?" Who even speaks like this?! It's not natural.
I'm still trying to figure out why Illiad, webcomic artist, needs CYMK seperations.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
"What really needs to happen is there needs to be an abstraction layer between app and QT/GTK so that i can just write an app with the same calls and let that layer handle talking to GTK/QT for me."
What the heck do you think GTK and QT ARE!!!!
They are abstraction layers between the app and the graphics/OS!
So you want and abstraction layer to an abstraction layer!
Tell you what. Go to GTK.org and down load the source for GTK.
Then go to KDE.org and download the source to QT.
Then start coding.
I for one will welcome this all power abstraction layer of which you speak.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.