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KOffice Descendent Calligra Office and Creativity Suite Hits Release
jrepin writes "The Calligra team has announced the first release of the Calligra suite of office and creativity applications. This marks the end of a long development period lasting almost one and a half year. It is the first release in a long series which is planned to make improved applications every 4 months. Calligra is a continuation of the old KOffice project and it may be interesting for KOffice users to know what they will get. Some highlights are: a completely rewritten text layout engine that can handle most of the advanced layout features of OpenDocument Format (ODF), simplified user interface, support for larger parts of the ODF specification (for example line endings like arrows), and improved import filters for Microsoft document formats. There are also two new applications: Flow for diagrams and flowcharts, and Braindump for the note taking. Calligra Active is a new interface for touch based devices and especially for the KDE Plasma Active environment. Several companies have already used Calligra as a base for their own office solution. One of them is Nokia with their N9 high end smartphone where Calligra is embedded into the so called Harmattan Office."
This got me to thinking on something that I've kind of lost track of in recent years. When people used to ask what the best alternative to MS Office was, especially on a budget, I used to tell them OpenOffice. But now I keep hearing about a slew of other alternatives, like this, too.
I guess what I'm asking (and I know this is subjective and I'm not looking to start a pissing contest here), is OpenOffice still the best alternative to Office out there? And how do some of these new alternatives compare (to each other and to Office)?
They seriously called it COCS?
Caligula's Creativity Suite?
I think that's one to stay away from.
'libreoffice is probably the best'
That competition is ok and a good thing, as opposed to the stupid kde/gnome/unity/kfce/lxde joke. The office suits whirl around the standards, whereas the kde/gnome/unity/xfce/lxde joke more is about penises less than 6 inches.
Go for standard formats and keep up competition where it works!
Something I've liked about KDE recently has been the push for movable, sizable, and groupable widgets and sections in the UI. Some follow some sort of convention. Most don't. I'm hoping Calligra standardizes their UI stuffs, as right now it's kinda random.
I miss the days when there were a bunch of word processors / office suites competing. I switched through various versions of Ami Pro, WordPerfect, Word Star, and a couple others I can't remember right now. Then in the mid 90's Word started to dominate and has become a defacto standard. Competitors are judged by how well their Word filters work. Bummer.
There are also two new applications: Flow for diagrams and flowcharts, and Braindump for the note taking.
If it has something comparable to MS Visio, suddenly I'm interested. Visio is pretty much eh only piece of software in the MS Office suite which I haven't found at least a very rough FOSS competitor to. I've been pinning my hopes on Libre/Open Office coming up with something, and never given KOffice much thought. This makes it a bit of a game changer for when I'm deciding which free office suite to throw on my home computers.
Anyone have any experience running this software under Windows 7? Or Gnome/XFCE/LXDE for that matter? Any good?
Coral Cache link to the press release/notes.
Use it.
coding is life
is here: http://www.kogmbh.com/download.html
You thinking not fast start ? Claigra him start super quick ! this main feature of office suite, I no want wait ! Features they bit nice, but no need to use them if not starting now !
Which sucks, because the Qt libraries for font rendering and printing are pretty godawful for something like a word processor. Just look at the serious kerning problems in the screenshots. I would advise Calligra to take a page from Scribus--another Qt-based project that chose to implement their own font rendering libraries to work around the shortcomings of Qt.
I just had a look @ their site. There are several things I liked about it. For starters, they chose sane names - like have the name Calligra precede Words, Sheets, Stage, Plan and Flow. Kexi didn't make sense - why not re-use the term dBase, since dBase IV has been dead for decades, and for notetaking, I'm not sure I liked 'Braindump' - maybe something like 'Scratchpad' would have been better? But Krita and Karbon both need to be renamed - no offense to Swedish users.
In KOffice, I used to use KWord, KSpread and Krita. The last was somewhat unintuitive, but still simpler than GIMP, which for me was overkill. Now, they've simplified the interface by combining the multiple docs, which is good - both Krita & GIMP were dock city for me. I'm glad they use ODF file formats. I'm not sure whether they can edit pdfs, but that would be a nice feature to have. Incidentally, does Flow have the same capabilities as Visio, or does one have to use Karbon? Is Kexi the equivalent of Access?
They will also have a version for tablets and phones called Calligra Active and Mobile respectively, which right now is a viewer only. Hopefully, it will be as good as Numbers and Keynote. One question - if Calligra sits on top of KDE, why does it need different versions for Linux and BSD? Speaking of which, while they currently offer it as a tarball, I'd like them to at some point offer it in .deb, .pbi, .ports, .rpm and other popular package managers.
Why, what's wrong w/ the Qt libraries for fornt rendering and printing, and is that a common problem b/w the different versions - 3, 4 and 5?
the KDE on Windows distribution of Calligra due to problems launching VBscripts on my XP box. However I installed it and launched from the command line. It is very nice and opened some .docx files.
What is missing from TFA is how well it stacks up with other software. When you want me to switch to your new system, you have to make your case. What is compelling about your product compared to e.g. OpenOffice, LibreOffice, MS Office? What makes it stand out? You have to be specific and say our software does X where product Y fails. Otherwise you're just wasting people's time.
If you want to move away from Visio, LibreOffice can import it's files today, grab it and have a go. Of course, improving it's diagramming functionality would be good too - currently it's not so wonderful.
Look at those font renderings... They are ugly and with jazzed edges and normal fonts look like they are bolded.
That is a typical problem.
1. Start new document in libreoffice writer and set specific letter format. Then type one line full of same letter.
2. Open that document in Calligra Words and notice the difference with same font etc.
I can't decide which is slower: The website or the software itself?
This, and it's been this same way since day 1 of KOffice. Font rendering has always sucked in Koffice and continues to suck in Calligra. Which is a shame because I've been jazzed about using KOffice since I first heard about it, and this is the only real problem I see in the product today. And yet it's such a major problem it's pretty much unusable for me.
Printing is actually more of a problem with KDE4. KDE4 STILL hasn't caught up to KDE3 in how well it handles printing, and it's because the KDE4 team has decided to hamstring themselves by using all-Qt libraries instead of writing their own.
In my opinion, use existing libraries when they are good. Write your own when the existing ones are no good. Apparently this sort of thinking is revolutionary...
When will the free software office suites realize that Braveheart was actually a metaphor about the whole office scene. We need WW to unite all these great projects into one great scottish product! UNITE THE CLANS against the those evil dirty brits (M$) :)
The other stuff in Braveheart was fluff, and if you listen close at the end. Right before they chop his head off, in his second last breath, whispers "software". Then takes a deep last breath and yells, FFFFRRRRREEEEEDDDDDOOOOMMMMMM! :)
Which sucks, because the Qt libraries for font rendering and printing are pretty godawful for something like a word processor. Just look at the serious kerning problems in the screenshots. I would advise Calligra to take a page from Scribus--another Qt-based project that chose to implement their own font rendering libraries to work around the shortcomings of Qt.
Newsflash: The screenshots on the Calligra website are from older development releases. Since then Qt 4.8 was released which fixes the problems.
KDE4 STILL hasn't caught up to KDE3 in how well it handles printing, and it's because the KDE4 team has decided to hamstring themselves by using all-Qt libraries instead of writing their own.
Well, considering that no one in his/her right mind still prints these days, I find it understandable that no KDE dev has any interest in developing that.