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KDE Readies KOffice 2.0 As OpenOffice Competitor

Posted by kdawson on from the another-country-heard-from dept.

Da Massive writes in with a link to a story on KOffice 2.0, the next generation of the KDE office suite due sometime next year. In an interview with KDE spokesman Sebastian Kugler, Computerworld reports that KOffice 2.0 will be leaner, faster, and enjoy a cleaner code base than OpenOffice. It will also feature more applications, including an Access-like database creator, a flowcharter, and an image manipulation tool. KOffice is not yet fully compatible with ODF but the claim is that 2.0 will be.

3 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. KOffice 2.0 is FAST! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The main benefit KOffice 2.0 brings is that it's sleek and fast. Unlike OpenOffice.org, KOffice has a very sensible architecture. Now, part of that is because KOffice is a far newer application. It builds directly on top of Qt, rather than implementing its own UI layer (like OpenOffice.org does). It also has a far more sensible component model, that suffers from only a small fraction of the bloat of the OO.o model.

    While OpenOffice.org may have a larger feature set at this point, it just won't be able to compete with KOffice when it comes to being responsive and memory-efficient. Having built the KOffice source code from SVN just last week, I can tell you that you'll notice the difference immediately. OpenOffice.org just feels really damn sluggish, while KOffice is quick.

    1. Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST! by theguyfromsaturn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And KOffice can open PDFs for editing. Awesome. Sure, the layout rendering is not always exact, but it does a tremendous job of converting the PDF to paragraphs, with the occasional embedded images. Scribus is also nice to import PostScript (why not PDFs?...) and respect the layout, but the text is usually broken down into individual characters. KWord does a great job with it. All in all, they each do their own job. It has allowed me to save some documents whose original editable copies got lost somehow... and for which I only had the PDF left. It's not as good as OOo at opening MS Office documents though, and the equations from ODF files aren't imported yet, but it's awesoooome.

      --
      I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
  2. Please try my database libraries / app by vandan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been working on my own Access-killer for a couple of years now. It's a suite of open-source, cross-platform Perl libraries, using Gtk2 for the GUI. The old website ( complete ) is at: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/. I'm right now working on a revamped website ( incomplete, but with up-to-date download links and new screenshots ) is at: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis_new/.

    There are 3 main components: a form object, a datasheet object, and a reporting module ( which exports to PDF via PDF::API2 ). I'm also working on a GUI object builder that exports XML for all 3 objects. Click on the 'future' link to see some screenshots of it in action. Note that I'm also looking for developers to help out, and maybe create a commercial project out of it ( I'm as-yet undecided whether to do this or not ).

    I've had a number of large, complex production systems built on these libraries in use for about 2 years now. Please try it out, comment, report bugs, help out ... :)