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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."
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
Does anyone smell a marketing rat trying to push new software?
Push it... to what end? To make more money? It's all free! And my experience is that the free software guys don't have Marketing Rats, or at least none worthy of the name, else the products wouldn't have names like "The GIMP."
At least they're competing on open standards. Sort of like Opera's race to get support for SVG-(tiny/full) into their browser ahead of Gecko etc. No embrace and extend bollocks ;).
I'm also pretty pleased to see another FOSS image editor doing well, competition does great things for the market, even when the market is free :). I'll definately be giving Krita a go soon.
Perfecting the art of insanity since 1982
Install KDE libraries.
Shazam.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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
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.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
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.
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.
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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
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?
``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.