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Calligra 2.5 Office and Creativity Suite Released
jrepin writes "The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce version 2.5 of Calligra, the KDE's office and creativity suite. Words, the word processor, has among other things improved support for editing of tables, tight run-around of text around images, manipulation of table borders, and dragging of text. Sheets, the spreadsheet application has a new stand-alone docker for the cell editor and a new cell tool window with cell formatting controls. Stage, the presentation program, has a number of usability improvements. Flow, the diagram application, has support for new stencils in odf custom shapes. Kexi, the database application, now offers a full screen mode. Krita, the painting application, has a new compositions docker, useful in movie storyboard generation. At the same time as the desktop version, the community also releases a QML based version for tablets and smartphone: Calligra Active."
If there's one application here I'd like to see on a (pen) tablet, it's braindump.
KDE's office suite reached the point where Excel and Word were in 1995! Great!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Does this support HTML (richtext) editing in cells? I.e., different format for different words, not just the whole cell.
And then when you export it to CSV, it'll output "Bold text Non bold text" ?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Krita, the painting application, has a new compositions docker, useful in movie storyboard generation.
Does that mean Krita can now be used to edit movie files, like Windows Movie Maker does w/ .wmv files?
They are imaginative but they do not hint to their function.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
No
No, it means that there is support for creating the series of still pictures that make up the story for a movie before the production starts.
OK, Grandpa. Turn that TV down, upstairs!
The battery is running low on your hearing aid, again.
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Never been known to fail..."
I tried Calligra and I like it. The suite is easy to customize, it doesn't have a lot of clutter and it is light on resources. My only issue with it is the lack of MS-Office support. I deal a lot with people sending me documents in various Office formats and Calligra will not save to MS-Office formats. Reading it does okay, but not writing and this is a big blocker for me. Hopefully they will address this soon as I would like to switch to Calligra full-time.
Calligra has Krita and other graphics tools too, which are pretty unique. Also the true RMS believers always steered clear from OpenOffice because it depends on Java.
Seriously - that formatting toolbar that adjusts to the task at hand looks great. Displaying it as a vertical palette rather than a horizontal ribbon like MS Office makes a lot of sense for the wide screens I use most of the time.
I'm not trying to hate on Calligra, but LibreOffice is the standard in the FOSS world. Why the seemingly duplicate effort?
I'm not saying that seemingly duplicate effort is bad; it's a balancing act. The dominant player can become stagnant (e.g., gcc back in the day, XFree86, etc.) and sometimes you need a new player to shake things up. But when both players seem to be in the same area, or one is way behind the others, I don't see the point.
You obviously didn't do this from memory, because I don't think that last verse is in the opening credits. So, no points for you.
Does Calligra include any publishing software - any equivalent (stripped down or whatever) of Adobe FrameMaker, Illustrator, et al?
Word Processor is not comparable, as there is no Mail Merge and other regular features of a Word Processor.
Pretty weak.
I agree that there is a plethora of Linux distros. But in this case, there being another application like Calligra Suite is simething similar to the days when in Windows, you had a choice of MS Office, WordPerfect Office and Lotus Ami Pro. Yeah, they were 3 different companies making competing products, but one would hardly say that 2 of them should never have existed, and that everyone should have worked @ Microsoft (even though MS Office ended up being the default)
Also, as others have pointed out, Calligra Office is made up of Qt parts that can be included seamlessly in other Qt applications - an advantage that one doesn't have w/ LO or OO. Besides, aside from the QA and QC that you mentioned, what Linux (and BSD) need are more apps. Not 100 word processors or 50 music players, but all sorts of applications - be it business software (incidentally, in the KDE suite, they have an financial manager application called Skrooge, which allows import/export to Quicken data formats. That's the great thing about KDE that no other DE has - an effort behind developing a range of apps. They need to do a greater variety of these apps, be it medical transcription software, small business manager (I'm not sure whether Skrooge is adequate) and other such things.
The other thing about KDE is that they optimize projects for every target platform. As has been noted before on /., they don't try to fit a phone interface on a desktop or a desktop interface on a tablet. They have 3 different interfaces for desktops, tablets and netbooks, and for those who claim that KDE has too many bells & whistles & is a resource glutton, they even have a lightweight DE called Razor-qt. Other DE projects, such as Gnome, would do well to emulate their example.
And no, I don't think it has anything to do w/ their licenses, since KDE and KDE apps are under LGPL (anybody know of any major differences b/w LGPL2 and LGPL3? I couldn't figure that out by reading them, but then again, IANAL) and Qt itself is dual-licensed (I wonder whether their new owners Digia will be using the QPL). KDE is a lot less fanatical about licenses than GNU (Incidentally, why don't they make Gnome3, which so many loathe, GPL3 as well?)