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."

Comments

Kudos to the dev team

[Dasher42]

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.

Re:Kudos to the dev team

[RAMMS EIN]

``it is mildly clunky''

and, last time I used it, very fast compared to the competition. That counts for a lot in my book. "It's the latency, stupid!"

Re:What the hell is this crap?

[MrZaius]

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

Re:Gnome version?

[porkThreeWays]

I think a lot of people get confused about KDE and Gnome. You don't really write a program to run in KDE or Gnome. They'll be written with either QT or GTK+ for the GUI toolkit. They might use certain kde or gnome libs on top of that as well. But both projects are fairly modular and programs usually don't require a full KDE install to run and I've never heard of a KDE program actually needing the user logged into a KDE environment to use the program. You'd just make sure that machine has the needed KDE libs. You can run it under almost any window manager or desktop environment if all the proper libs are in place. So once you've got a mature app written like KOffice, you wouldn't just up and switch GUI toolkits. The only reason an open source project might do that is if they wanted better MS Windows support because historically QT hasn't been as available on windows as gtk. With qt4 I think this is going to change however.

Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp

[Laur]

Nevertheless, KWord's inability to export to MS Word format is a dealbreaker... so I reluctantly installed AbiWord

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."

Re:Kerning

[jZnat]

I'm pretty sure that's a Qt problem that's fixed in Qt 4 (and thus KOffice 2.0 when that's released).