KDE Releases Calligra 2.7

jrepin writes "The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra active and the Calligra Office Engine. Words, the word processing application, has a new look for the toolbox. In the same toolbox there are also new controls to manipulate shapes with much enhanced usability. Author, the writer's application, has new support for EPUB3: mathematical formulas and multimedia contents are now exported to ebooks using the EPUB format. There is also new support for book covers using images. Plan, the project management application, has improvement in the scheduling of tasks. The formula shape now has new ways to enter formula: a matlab/octave mode and a LaTEX mode."

Comments

calligra?

[solafide]

Didn't you mean Kalligra? What kind of KDE program _is_ this?

Re:calligra?

[ls671]

I just checked in my KDE menu and it is indeed called Calligra. Note that I use LibreOffice although...

Re:calligra?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh?

Re:calligra?

[ls671]

Whoosh Whoosh? ;-)

Re:calligra?

[unixisc]

KDE has stopped obsessively spelling everything w/ a 'K' for a while now - this ain't surprising

Where did this come from?

[tyroneking]

I've been aware of Planner for some time - but Braindump, Flow? These I've never heard of but they look great!
Anyone worked with Calligra? Compare Braindump to Freemind? Flow to Omnigraffle?

Re:Where did this come from?

[icebike]

I've been using KDE since it was released, and have never given Calliga a peek, and only about 6 months ago have I even heard of Calliga at all.

You'd never know it by visiting the Calligra site, but it was forked from KOffice, and Kword, KSpread, KPresenter etc. all got
renamed after the Fork. (I had guessed it was a fork because large application suites don't spring fully fledged from nothing).

A primer for those new to Caligra is Here.

  I'm not sure I need yet another office suite at work, but it has some things that might be interesting
to try, since installation is just a click away on any competent Linux Distro.

Re:Where did this come from?

[tyroneking]

Thanks for the info - I think I'll give Braindump a go in the next few weeks (when they update their Ubuntu repo's)

Re:Where did this come from?

[AvitarX]

I think the Calliga name is quite new (and I assume Words is Kword 2).

I'm hoping for a usable cross platform Kexi personally.

Re:Where did this come from?

[pavon]

I think the Calliga name is quite new...

The first Calliga release was a little over a year ago, although the Calliga fork occurred about 2.5 years ago. It was a mass-exodus fork where nearly all the developers and maintainers went to the new project.

(and I assume Words is Kword 2).

Nope, Calliga Words was written from scratch over the last few years. Kword is the only KOffice application that did not become a Calliga application.

Re:Where did this come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, Calliga Words was written from scratch over the last few years. Kword is the only KOffice application that did not become a Calliga application.

Interesting, because the screen shots I glanced at really reminded me of it. I guess that just means KDE does really provide a framework for consistent application look and feel.

Re:Where did this come from?

[nurb432]

It came from Koffice.

Re:Where did this come from?

[icebike]

Interesting, because the screen shots I glanced at really reminded me of it. I guess that just means KDE does really provide a framework for consistent application look and feel.

Well I only have 2.5 on my machine, waiting for OpenSuse to push 2.7, and most of Calliga looks decidedly bland, like they have done the bare minimum to get it working.

My version has move all the controls from the top to the side, which works great for documents, not so great for spread sheets, but they spent so little time doing this that the sidebar controls are obtuse. No hover help.

On the upside, it opens everything I've thrown at it, although selecting all text in a document and changing font family maxed out one of my processors for so ling I had to kill the task.

I'm really looking forward to the 2.7 release.

Caligula?

[Anonymous Coward]

Caligula? Why would I want to use something named after a sado-masochistic Roman emperor?

Re:Caligula?

[hierofalcon]

If you ever tried to import a document from your kid's Mac into it, you'd understand completely.

Calligra Words

[Peter H.S.]

is the only part of the Calligra Suite I have really tried out (version 2.6.4). It lacks some features necessary for me, but it is a nice lightweight word processor. Its best feature is its tabbed & indexed sidebar. Just moving icon toolbars to the side doesn't work. It seems so logical to use some of that wide screen real estate for toolbars, but in reality it is hard to make sidebars work.

But Calligra Word has got it right:
Text instead of icons.
Tabbed & indexed to maximize the information, but without losing spatial memory of where functions are. (The main thing I hate about Microsofts "Ribbon").

The Calligra Word "Dockers" is also a very nice concept: they are basically information and toolbar tiles that defaults to the right side. They can either be compressed when tiled together, be tabbed behind each other, or float freely

Looking at the screenshoot of the new 2.7 version, they seem to have improved the toolboxes and their layout even further

Another thing Calligra does very well, is integration with the other components. The Calligra Word has superb drawing and figure making and manipulation abilities, while feeling really fast and lightweight at the same time, no long waits or disc trashing while the drawing component is started etc.
It really shines when it comes to making fast one-off DTP/presentation stuff like combining text, figures and pictures, and connecting them with lines.

Re:Calligra Words

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who do not know history, are doomed to repeat it.

Everybody nowadays tries to imitate the InfoBox, known from Lotus WordPro, but nobody quite achieves it.

The key points everybody gets wrong:
- It wasn't like a dialog box to set something. It was a editable *state* display. That means undo was unnecessary. Really. If you clicked something, just click it again. Or pick the old checkbox again.
- It allowed you to pick and edit *all* levels of document hierarchy that the cursor currently was in. Paragraph inside a table inside a paragraph inside a frame inside a section inside the document? Just pick the context you want to edit with the drop-down box in the title bar of the box. (Where it says "Page layout" in the screenshot.)
- It was deeply built around *inheriting* style classes! Everything you changed, relative to the current style class, was marked with a little red dot. The last tab was the style class tab, where you could pick a class for the current context, and where you could create your own class, inheriting everything but the changes (red dots) from the parent class. Or undo changes and go back to the class. So even if you changed many things, undo was unnecessary.
- It was keyboard-based! Even though it didn't look like it. No matter where you were, Alt-Enter, and you had the InfoBox open, and ready to edit. Because there's nothing worse in a TEXT EDITING program, than to constantly having to switch to the mouse.

It was pretty damn close to perfect, and nothing since even comes close. (The Ribbon interface is the opposite of coming close. ;)

The only things one could have improved, were
1. allowing keyboard shortcuts, maybe even VI-like, but with the shortcuts ALWAYS being displayed next to the mouse-clickable option.
2. Putting the panels underneath each other and into a sidebar. But you have to understand, that back then, 1024x768 was a BIG resolution. We started out with 640x480! Try resizing your browser window to that right now! ... Yeah... A sidebar simply was not an option.
3. Yeah, text instead of icons... or my favorite option... both... that would have been good too, but again: screen space simply didnâ(TM)t allow it. Otherwise you just end up with menus again. Which are great, but only if you can't display it all right away.

So... whoever brings this beauty of a UI concept, in all its glory, back on my screen, is who gets my money. Big time.

Re:Calligra Words

[icebike]

Ok, we're getting off you lawn now Pops, calm down, maybe sit a spell...

Re:Calligra Words

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

Icons that are a good representation of their function and toolbar customization together provide the same easily-recognized features as a sidebar in a much smaller space. If users are having trouble to the point of needing labels after a few uses, that suggests that the icon designers focused too heavily on being attractive or trendy rather than clearly representing their function. It's a sadly common problem in modern-day software, regardless of its economic or source status -- a shame, since there's no lack of info on good UI design.

I use OpenOffice rather than Calligra, but I got to try out the sidebar approach as OO got basically the same thing in last week's release. The sidebar/text-instead-of-icons approach is okay for someone that periodically does word-processing with one document at a time -- not for people that wish to conserve screen space (e.g. to compare versions, refer to notes, or keep other programs visible) or that use it often enough to know their icons/shortcuts.

Personally, I want *any* WP window to be focused on my document and let me use the rest of my 1920x1080 23" screen for other things -- show another file, access files, use my playlist, or even stare at my wallpaper while thinking something over. As I've learned the icons I use, customized my toolbar and know basic keyboard shortcuts, it seems odd to use a relatively wide vertical stripe of my WP window to house dialog boxes that I either rarely use or that have the same stuff that's in my toolbar.

A few OO screenshots to illustrate:
My typical setup vs. OO4 w/Properties sidebar
Mine w/Styles dialog vs. OO w/Styles sidebar
Notes: That setup takes up around half of my screen, and "Styles" always looks nearly that empty as I only use 1-3 styles per document. (Have to enjoy the irony in the large sidebar-choosing icons being attractive but not terribly well-designed as UI elements, given they presumably exist in part because people can't identify the normal icons...)

Re:Calligra Words

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have no arguments, but still are a loser, I guess you have to resort to attacking the person instead of the argument. (And it wasn't even a "us vs. them" argument. But I guess in the USA, everyone is brainwashed into seeing every damn thing that way, and thinking this is a valid way to respond. Fox "News" style.)
The problem is, that since it is no argument, the reply also doesn't require an argument. There is nothing to refute. Nothing was said. (So I had a bit of fun with personal attacks too. Not saying they aren't fun. Especially on a failure like you. ;)

Update to windows port?

[nurb432]

This would be nice, and have all the modules, not just some.

Calligra web site is uninformative

[iliketrash]

The Calligra web site is incredibly bad—there is almost no information about any of the programs, just a few superficial paragraphs. Just awful, an embarrassment to the development team, I'm sure.

This is an example of the "airport signs" problem: The people who build the airport already know how to get around the airport and so the signs that they put up are not helpful to those who rarely visit the airport.

On another crappy note, the link to the OS X installer just goes 404.

Oh well.

w00t!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, an upgrade to Caligari2. Praise the Lard!