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

Kerning

[BeeBeard]

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.

Re:For people who complain about GIMP

[photomonkey]

Not really, because a lot of the people I know that use Pshop and other Win/Mac only photo software can't get the linux stuff to do what we want easily enough.

I need simple support for camera raw files, multiple (including uncommon) colorspaces, exif and IPTC/XMP support and respect, and better image browsing/sorting tools.

I am a professional photographer and have tried to put together a linux system that would meet ALL the requirements of the job, and have been as yet unable to do so. And I don't mean "I took a weekend" kind of trying.

Show me a combination of linux software packages that work as well as (not use the same cpu cycles, not use less memory, not play well with t'0pen s0-urse' file formats) or better than (that's where I get concerned with hardware requirements, hardware compatibility and system overhead) the industry standard Photoshop+PhotoMechanic+NoiseNinja (or some other noise correction software) combo, and I will be frucking amazed.

This actually raises a good question. I'm a professional photographer (news, commercial, portrait and event) and I need to be able to quickly and easily dump a CF card onto a computer, apply IPTC/XMP information to them while or after ingesting the photos, browse collections of these photos (.NEF [Nikon RAW file format], jpeg and tif files), and edit them in or convert them between industry-standard colorspaces such as (but not limited to) CYMK, Adobe 98, and of course, some flavor of sRGB.

Oh yeah, and the software/OS need to support hardware-level or equally good color profiling as well as a general high quality photo scanner, negative scanner (for digging into the older, pre-digital work) and photo printer.

So how do I do it?

PS, I am totally willing to help/advise an ambitious Linux zealot put together a Linux distro or software package that steps it up to the professional level. I and others would love to stop giving Adobe $800 every time they drop a new Pshop. I can't code, but I sure as hell know what needs to be accomplished with the software and am willing to help with look and feel. I'm serious.

Until there is support for the nitty-gritty necessary to the job, pros won't care and consumers will continue to use the 'easier' Win/Mac stuff.