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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."
OpenOffice's fork libreoffice is probably the best. I haven't had a chance to play with calligra, but Koffice is a joke. Sure its fast and lightweight, but it doesn't really render any documment type very well (ODF or Microsoft formats) and crashes at every chance. There are individual applications like Krita the photo editing app that are solid decent apps, but the main Office aps ( word processor, spreadsheet, slide show presenter) suck.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You should test it again. Calligra renders all the document types very much better, including MS formats, and it doesn't crash (we hope :) ).
And Krita is not a photo editing app but a painting app. It used to be a do-it-all for images but a few years ago they decided to become a pure painting app. Which they did.
I have heard this before, but i have not had problems with Koffice for a few versions now.
Sure, it was more lightweight ( by design ) and not real compatible, but it was a nice light alternative to the big boys. Espcially when you realize that 90% of the features in the larger suites go un-used by 90% of the users.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Libreoffice's community is definitely better than OpenOffice, but I'm not so sure that it is better. It is still a young project, and I have had terrible trouble installing and upgrading the software. It is also very slow and contains plenty of bugs still.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I've heard a lot of people on /. state that libreoffice is better than OpenOffice, but I haven't heard many reasons why. What advantages does it have, beyond not being controlled by Oracle?
I've been using Open Office for years and have no complaints about it. (But at the same time, I don't use it in many advanced ways. After a certain point of complexity, I switch over more specific tools like Scribus.) Am I missing some fatal flaw in Open Office though, that libreoffice somehow fixes?
If you are still using old fashioned .doc files or ODF, you can get away with using OpenOffice/LibreOffice. I've used OO.o with MSOffice 97-03 files for the past 6 years with minimal compatibility problems. However, all that goes out the window with OOXML files, since support for that is still abysmal in OO.o or LO. For instance, don't even think of editing a moderately complex (multi-level headings, lists, tables, etc.) docx in Writer. Writer makes a passable docx viewer but the file will be fucked up every single time if you modify it in Writer and then open it again in Word. I found that out the hard way.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Libre office simply has more features. There were a lot of features people wanted to add to open office but couldn't get past the Sun gatekeeper. That lead to the Go-oo fork with all of those added in. Now they've merged with libreoffice, so all of those features and developers have been added into libre. Basically the bigest features for me are improved MS format fiedelity in reading and writing.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Ach, forgot Krita changed. Calligra isn't really easy to test right now without going outside of my distro's binary packages. Not willing to destablize my daily desktop to try it. I'm sure they've improved it since the fork, they've had more than enough time to do so ....
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Significantly decreased memory usage
Significantly improved compatibility/speed with OOXML and other formats.
Look & Feel better matches native applications
Improved Font Rendering on Linux
New import filters: Lotus Word Pro, MS Works
SVG import
Spreadsheets support RxCx cell references.
Can use online help for more up-to-date documentation.
Libreoffice (sorry, I am going to mash up versions). No "fatal" flaw fixed -- but there are a lot of improvements.
- improved text display
- better typography (true small-caps, etc.)
- bug fixes
- improved ergonomics (dialogs, previews)
- better header/footer editing
- better import/export, including Visio import
- dead code removal
- grammar checker
Anyway, OpenOffice is no longer Oracle, so there may be a merge
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
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.
COCS for UNIX.
It figures.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
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
COCS for UNIX.
It figures.
I know - it's appalling. As a KDE application they should put a K somewhere in the abbreviation.
Caligula's Creativity Suite?
I think that's one to stay away from.
That's how I read it at first too. I was intrigued, then disappointed when I realized my mistake.
This is how I feel about anything that starts with a 'K' or spawned from it. Not a big fan of the "Let's copy Microsoft's really bad interface, and not use established standards by requiring our own huge set of daemons to run for IPC instead" crowd.
Versus whom else's huge set of daemons to run? Gnome's?
The equations, especially on page 12 and 13 of this ppt look good in libreoffice (3.5.1), but not on calligre (2.4.0) (from ubuntu 12.04):
http://www.cs.duke.edu/~reif/courses/alglectures/reif.lectures/ALG3.2.ppt
Yeah, mathematical formulas is a weak area right now. But there is going to be a Google Summer of Code project to improve that.
Depends in part on whether you're starting from go-oo or regular OO. Go-oo was a set of patches created by merging all the independent patches created by Novell and Debian, and not accepted by Sun. Most Linux distros offered Go-oo under the name OpenOffice. Go-oo had several features not supported by upstream OO.
LibreOffice started with Go-oo, then undertook a massive code cleanup which resulted in a functionally identical, but much smaller, faster, and easier-to-maintain, code base. Then they started adding more improvements (beyond those offered by Go-oo), some of which have been mentioned by other posters.
Meanwhile, OO got relicensed and dumped into the Apache incubator. It's currently undergoing an audit to make sure that all the components (including third-party libraries and such) are compatible with the Apache license. This may or may not end up in a slight reduction in functionality (I'm not following the development that closely, since I don't care). Once that's complete (if it's not already), they'll still be quite a bit behind where LO started, even if they don't end up removing any functionality, because Go-oo wasn't donated to Apache, and is still under the GPL. So, they'll have something that is much larger, much slower, much harder to maintain, and they'll be way behind on features. At that point, the question becomes can they possibly catch up?
Here's what LO's got: a big head start, a much-improved code-base that provides a much lower barrier for potential new devs, a solid core dev team (there's a big question about how much of the old OO team Oracle will allow to keep working on OO, since it's no longer a Sun/Oracle product) and a much better product, both in terms of features and performance.
Here's what OO's got: name recognition, a license that allows proprietary derivatives, and (as a result of that last) strong support from IBM, who used to have a separate license to the old OO codebase, and doesn't want to dump or GPL Notes.
My money's on LO, but the name recognition and IBM support are nothing to sneeze at, so I'm not making any big bets at this time. But it's probably going to take the OO devs somewhere between one and two years just to catch up with where LO is now, by which time, LO will have added even more.
Frankly, I think you should probably try LO just for the performance improvements, even if you don't use any of the new features. You've got nothing to lose.
Well IBM is apparently ending the Symphony fork, which may help in terms of features. Besides, the Apache license is better than the LO tri-license. I always thought having three copyleft licenses was kind of defeating the purpose of copyleft, since someone could easily fork the code under only one of the licenses which would be useless to the original project.
The Force is strong with this one.
How is three explicit licenses any more prone to forking than one promiscuous license that allows all sorts of sublicensing? I can create a GPL-only fork of ApacheOO just as easily as I can create a GPL-only fork of LO. Your argument makes no sense.
Good news about the Symphony fork I suppose. I wish both projects the best of luck, but my money's still on LO at the moment, and OO is going to have to do some amazing things to change my mind.
Lightweight means that when I start koffice it opens in a second, whereas when I start Libre Office I'm waiting 10 seconds and the whole computer feels slowed down by it.
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And that 90% is different for every user. You might use all the charting in excel, I might use all the financial functions. You might use the templates in word, I might use the collaboration tools.
That's a pity, b'cos I've used it a few times, and found it a lot simpler to use than GIMP. So does Calligra (glad they didn't spell it w/ a 'K') include any other do-it-all for images? I also agree w/ the GP about KOffice - used it, but found the spreadsheet woefully short of what I got w/ Excel 2003. However, would be happy to try Calligra - mainly important that their word processor, spreadsheet and slide show presenter are good. Also, do they include any database like Access?
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 best non-free one is Softmaker Office. Multi-platform support, low price, almost perfect compatibility and good old menu-based UI. What you don't get with it is macro recorder - you have to write macros yourself in a VBA-like language called BasicMaker. And BasicMaker is Windows-only.
What advantages does it have, beyond not being controlled by Oracle?
Oracle doesn't control it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Sorry, you're not the target audience.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
How do I enable the ribbon in KDE applications and koffice? I can't find it.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Yes, LibreOffice is the king here, but I at least Caligre is trying new things. Look at the sidebars in the spreadsheet program. This is an interesting placement for extra functions, and there are quite a lot of them. This is an alternative to menu's and ribbons, that is a different (no judgement on better or worse yet) approach, and is consistent throughout the application suite. I have to hand it to them for using the power of QT and will want to see how that works for me.
I want to add that I feel very fortunate that I have 3 free options for working with spreadsheets. I have found ideas and features not available in the others that do come in handy working with data that people provide in Excel format. I have worked around Excel numeric bugs, performed sheet counts, auto renaming sheets, provided quick data entry forms for example.
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.
They seriously called it COCS?
Wow, posting a dumb comment after only reading the headline -- not even the summary.
The software is simply called Calligra and comes in three flavors:
Calligra Suite -- complete package for desktop PCs
Calligra Mobile -- smartphone version (limited feature set)
Calligra Active -- tablet version (limited feature set)
do they include any database like Access?
Yes: http://kexi-project.org/
what on earth does lightweight mean ?
It means that Calligra can run on smartphones while LO cannot.
The software is pretty snappy for me.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.