The problem is actually not so much running on OSX, which works, but that nobody has yet created a good package. I'm not myself familiar with packaging for OSX so I can't say for sure what's holding it up. I just know that so far there have been problems when people tried.
Calligra is an application suite with some applications that are office applications and some that aren't. Krita, for instance, is not an office application, it's a paint application for professional artists. In fact, before Krita created its own website (krita.org) the spread of it was hampered by its association to the office applications.
Not "they". Sebastian Sauer. He has made a truly remarkable job by porting the Calligra engine to Android in 2-3 weeks. But it's not an officially released suite (or even application) yet by the Calligra community. I'm sure that it will be, but it's not yet.
Btw, the Calligra Active group, who is working on the tablet edition of Calligra, have started to create QML components of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation modules. For those you who are not into Qt and QML development, this means that you will be able to embed, say, a spreadsheet into your application by just adding an include file. This is the power of Qt.
Sebastian said to me that the next milestones after getting the thing working at all was:
- Adding doc and docx import filters
- Add spreadsheet support
- Add presentation support
I think you are mixing two things: Using the Calligra engine for a viewer (which is excellent) and the Calligra Suite for desktop (which is indeed somewhat buggy). But it's already much much better.
Besides, note that this is not the Calligra community doing something. It's one individual who has released an Android viewer (alpha quality right now) based on the Calligra engine (stable). I can't say anything about how fast the full package will be extended or stabilized but the underlying engine is already very good.
The Calligra rendering engine is actually very good. Nokia put a lot of effort into Calligra to make it a super good document viewer for their N900 and N9 MeeGo phones. This includes all MS Office formats (doc/docx, xls/xlsx, ppt/pptx). Heck, Calligra supports more of docx than MS own embedded office versions. And it's much better than any other free offering, including OpenOffice or LibreOffice, when it comes to viewing.
Since it's not acceptable we are very happy to receive your contributions here. Most progress is achieved by people who think that something is not acceptable.
Seriously, I wonder what gives you this sense of entitlement. Everybody who works on Calligra is a volunteer except for the few hired by KO GmbH in Germany who provide support for Calligra. But they are doing the bidding of their customers, who apparently haven't seen fit yet to pay for a mac port.
So in this case it's either put up or wait until somebody with more initiative creates a package on the Mac.
I really cannot understand why there is not more interest in this. This is HUGE: It's the first and only fully free working environment for tablets. And it presents a new way of working with tablets (activities) that seems to be more suited to our brains than other paradigms. And it's beautiful to boot.
No, this is not correct although I understand why you might get that impression.
Here is the short story on the Calligra Suite:
Calligra was indeed spun off from KOffice about a year ago. Some call it a fork but it was actually more of a split. Some applications moved to Calligra (KPlatoPlan, Kexi, Brainstorm, KPresenterStage), some others were indeed forked ( KWordWords). Many of them got new names as did the whole suite (which you can see in the previous sentence).
KOffice was a nice enough office suite for users with simple needs, but the Calligra team has bigger plans. One of the big strengths oof Calligra is that it's both very modular and the UI is well separated from what we call the Office Engine which handles loading, storing, saving, and rendering of documents but not editing. This is the result of the work from the last 2 years, much of it sponsored by Nokia. During the same time the engine itself has also been much improved with a completely new text layout engine, automatic tests to ensure that we don't get any regressions, many new features and improved stability. There is a company called KO GmbH that does commercial work on Calligra, and they have had most of their business around the engine and the import filters for Microsoft formats.
So during this last year much much energy has been put into the office engine which benefits all platforms / UI's and a number of new UI's have been developed: Nokia Harmattan Office for the N9, Calligra Mobile for the nokia n900 (this one is actually a bit older), Calligra Active for the Plasma Active environment which just got announced will be used in the Spark tablet.
What has indeed been lagging behind was the desktop UI which would give you the impression that you got. But the last few months we have also seen a lot of work here. The style manager has been improved, the text formatting dialogs (actually dockers in the case of Calligra desktop) are much nicer now and new features like footnotes/endnotes and many others have been developed and integrated. Note that these features were already present in the engine so it was a relatively minor effort to implement them in the UI. Also other applications than the word processor have gotten a number of new features but Calligra is so modular that it's sometimes difficult to say which application benefits the most from a new feature. If it's available in one application it's also available in the others provided that the feature makes sense in them.
Now we are getting closer to the first release. We hope it will be at the beginning of March, and we have great hopes that people will like what we have done.
If you want to embed or reuse a library then I would suggest that you would be better off by using the Office Engine from the Calligra Suite (http//www.calligra.org/). It is already used in many mobile and embedded places, e.g. the office viewer in the Nokia N9 smartphone. The engine -- and the apps themselves -- are all under LGPL which makes it usable even with non-free apps.
*totally made up but based on on linux having 2% at most of the desktop market and gnome being the most popular.
Ah, but it isn't. If you just confine yourself to the US, you may think so. But if you look around globally, you will find that KDE is actually used more. For instance, see the 24 Million(!) school kids in Brazil using the KDE desktop.
* KDE was rebranded a year ago. It's now the name of the community, not the desktop.
* KDE, the community, is stronger than ever with more contributors than ever and more commits than ever.
* Calligra does not switch focus to mobile, but it *extends* the focus to mobile... and tablets... and so on.
Let me assure you that Aaron is *not* generally thought of as being selfish and elitist. He is a very smart guy who sees the big picture in things and who also listens to other people a lot before he makes up his mind. He also has a good way with words, which may not go well down with people who have other agendas.
Those of us who often interact and work with Aaron sees what an immense load of bullshit he has to put up with from anonymous cowards. We know he is a pleasant guy, and we not only like him, but also pity him sometimes for the flack he has to endure. Like the parent.
This makes no sense. An office suite like OpenOffice.org can't be replaced with an online service. They should put some effort into KOffice instead and then use that. That's what Nokia is doing for their N900 Linux phone and it's the best choice for this situation.
I know that many are going to say now that KOffice will bring in many megs of dependencies, but that's not strictly true. There are ways to cut out what you need from Qt and kdelibs, and that is what the developers did on the N900.
The KOffice developers don't package KOffice binaries. That's done by either the distros in the Linux case or the KDE-on-Windows team for Windows. I'm sure they will package KOffice 2.0.0 soon.
Then, on the other hand, it may take some time because the KDE windows installer is not 100% ready yet. We'll see.
Yeah, sure I'm a marketer. Or rather: I'm a developer doing some marketing work. I am of the opinion that if we don't tell the world about our great work, then sure as hell nobody else will do it for us. And if we happen to be the best at something, then that's what I will say.
There are so many great open source projects that nobody is using just because nobody knows about it. I'm not going to let that happen to KOffice.
I have a great problem with how the OO.o and SO people say that they are the reference implementation of OpenDocument. In fact, they are not! There are a number of features in the ODF that they don't support, e.g. frame based documents. Remember, the ODF is the result of a group of vendors agreeing, not only one and that is the strength of it. The other big free office suite, KOffice, has support for less of the features that ODF offers, but there are some areas where it is ahead.
There are also some areas that are currently uncovered by ODF that will be defined in the near future, for instance pixel based layered images. The KOffice team is currently working on these file formats in cooperation with other image editor vendors, and the OO.o/SO team is very welcome to become part of the effort. However, we haven't seen much interest there yet.
What is remaining for ODF to be healthy standard - is competing implementations. KOffice is limited to KDE which doesn't run under Windows.
On the contrary, KOffice will run on Windows very soon. Kdelibs are being ported to Qt4 as we speak, and almost runs under Windows already. The same is happening with KOffice, and I think we will see a proof of concept of KOffice running on Windows before summer this year.
Kubuntu was one of the first distros to release KOffice 1.5 packages. In fact they were available already at the release moment. Just see the announcement for links, or go to kubuntu.org.
The stability is much, much better, especially for KWord. That was one of the goals of this release.
That said, if you still experience crashes we would be very grateful if you reported them at bugs.kde.org. We actually do care and do read the reports, and have fixed many of them already just because they were reported.
Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!
on
KOffice 1.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This sounds more like a bug to me. Two questioins:
1. Was this KWord 1.5 or an earlier version? 1.5 has had many fixes for OpenDocument and might very well work if you used an older version in your example.
2. If it WAS 1.5, could you report the bug to bugs.kde.org? If possible, attach the document, as this will make it easier for us to fix the bug.
Last, but not least, don't forget that OpenOffice.org does also contain bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is actually not so much running on OSX, which works, but that nobody has yet created a good package. I'm not myself familiar with packaging for OSX so I can't say for sure what's holding it up. I just know that so far there have been problems when people tried.
Calligra is an application suite with some applications that are office applications and some that aren't. Krita, for instance, is not an office application, it's a paint application for professional artists. In fact, before Krita created its own website (krita.org) the spread of it was hampered by its association to the office applications.
Btw, the Calligra Active group, who is working on the tablet edition of Calligra, have started to create QML components of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation modules. For those you who are not into Qt and QML development, this means that you will be able to embed, say, a spreadsheet into your application by just adding an include file. This is the power of Qt.
Sebastian said to me that the next milestones after getting the thing working at all was:
- Adding doc and docx import filters
- Add spreadsheet support
- Add presentation support
I think you are mixing two things: Using the Calligra engine for a viewer (which is excellent) and the Calligra Suite for desktop (which is indeed somewhat buggy). But it's already much much better. Besides, note that this is not the Calligra community doing something. It's one individual who has released an Android viewer (alpha quality right now) based on the Calligra engine (stable). I can't say anything about how fast the full package will be extended or stabilized but the underlying engine is already very good.
The Calligra rendering engine is actually very good. Nokia put a lot of effort into Calligra to make it a super good document viewer for their N900 and N9 MeeGo phones. This includes all MS Office formats (doc/docx, xls/xlsx, ppt/pptx). Heck, Calligra supports more of docx than MS own embedded office versions. And it's much better than any other free offering, including OpenOffice or LibreOffice, when it comes to viewing.
Since it's not acceptable we are very happy to receive your contributions here. Most progress is achieved by people who think that something is not acceptable. Seriously, I wonder what gives you this sense of entitlement. Everybody who works on Calligra is a volunteer except for the few hired by KO GmbH in Germany who provide support for Calligra. But they are doing the bidding of their customers, who apparently haven't seen fit yet to pay for a mac port. So in this case it's either put up or wait until somebody with more initiative creates a package on the Mac.
I really cannot understand why there is not more interest in this. This is HUGE: It's the first and only fully free working environment for tablets. And it presents a new way of working with tablets (activities) that seems to be more suited to our brains than other paradigms. And it's beautiful to boot.
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.
Hmm, there used to be arrows behind the old and new names for the applications.
KWord -> Words
KPresenter -> Stage
KPlato -> Plan
Here is the short story on the Calligra Suite:
Calligra was indeed spun off from KOffice about a year ago. Some call it a fork but it was actually more of a split. Some applications moved to Calligra (KPlatoPlan, Kexi, Brainstorm, KPresenterStage), some others were indeed forked ( KWordWords). Many of them got new names as did the whole suite (which you can see in the previous sentence).
KOffice was a nice enough office suite for users with simple needs, but the Calligra team has bigger plans. One of the big strengths oof Calligra is that it's both very modular and the UI is well separated from what we call the Office Engine which handles loading, storing, saving, and rendering of documents but not editing. This is the result of the work from the last 2 years, much of it sponsored by Nokia. During the same time the engine itself has also been much improved with a completely new text layout engine, automatic tests to ensure that we don't get any regressions, many new features and improved stability. There is a company called KO GmbH that does commercial work on Calligra, and they have had most of their business around the engine and the import filters for Microsoft formats.
So during this last year much much energy has been put into the office engine which benefits all platforms / UI's and a number of new UI's have been developed: Nokia Harmattan Office for the N9, Calligra Mobile for the nokia n900 (this one is actually a bit older), Calligra Active for the Plasma Active environment which just got announced will be used in the Spark tablet.
What has indeed been lagging behind was the desktop UI which would give you the impression that you got. But the last few months we have also seen a lot of work here. The style manager has been improved, the text formatting dialogs (actually dockers in the case of Calligra desktop) are much nicer now and new features like footnotes/endnotes and many others have been developed and integrated. Note that these features were already present in the engine so it was a relatively minor effort to implement them in the UI. Also other applications than the word processor have gotten a number of new features but Calligra is so modular that it's sometimes difficult to say which application benefits the most from a new feature. If it's available in one application it's also available in the others provided that the feature makes sense in them.
Now we are getting closer to the first release. We hope it will be at the beginning of March, and we have great hopes that people will like what we have done.
If you want to embed or reuse a library then I would suggest that you would be better off by using the Office Engine from the Calligra Suite (http//www.calligra.org/). It is already used in many mobile and embedded places, e.g. the office viewer in the Nokia N9 smartphone. The engine -- and the apps themselves -- are all under LGPL which makes it usable even with non-free apps.
*totally made up but based on on linux having 2% at most of the desktop market and gnome being the most popular.
Ah, but it isn't. If you just confine yourself to the US, you may think so. But if you look around globally, you will find that KDE is actually used more. For instance, see the 24 Million(!) school kids in Brazil using the KDE desktop.
* KDE was rebranded a year ago. It's now the name of the community, not the desktop.
* KDE, the community, is stronger than ever with more contributors than ever and more commits than ever.
* Calligra does not switch focus to mobile, but it *extends* the focus to mobile... and tablets... and so on.
Let me assure you that Aaron is *not* generally thought of as being selfish and elitist. He is a very smart guy who sees the big picture in things and who also listens to other people a lot before he makes up his mind. He also has a good way with words, which may not go well down with people who have other agendas. Those of us who often interact and work with Aaron sees what an immense load of bullshit he has to put up with from anonymous cowards. We know he is a pleasant guy, and we not only like him, but also pity him sometimes for the flack he has to endure. Like the parent.
This makes no sense. An office suite like OpenOffice.org can't be replaced with an online service. They should put some effort into KOffice instead and then use that. That's what Nokia is doing for their N900 Linux phone and it's the best choice for this situation. I know that many are going to say now that KOffice will bring in many megs of dependencies, but that's not strictly true. There are ways to cut out what you need from Qt and kdelibs, and that is what the developers did on the N900.
First they ignore you
Then they ridicule you
Then they fight you
They you win.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which step we are at now. :-)
Then, on the other hand, it may take some time because the KDE windows installer is not 100% ready yet. We'll see.
Sorry, this is wrong. KOffice is *from* KDE (i.e. the KDE community). It's for all major desktops, including Gnome.
But yes, it is a different code base than the others.
There are so many great open source projects that nobody is using just because nobody knows about it. I'm not going to let that happen to KOffice.
There are also some areas that are currently uncovered by ODF that will be defined in the near future, for instance pixel based layered images. The KOffice team is currently working on these file formats in cooperation with other image editor vendors, and the OO.o/SO team is very welcome to become part of the effort. However, we haven't seen much interest there yet.
On the contrary, KOffice will run on Windows very soon. Kdelibs are being ported to Qt4 as we speak, and almost runs under Windows already. The same is happening with KOffice, and I think we will see a proof of concept of KOffice running on Windows before summer this year.
Kubuntu was one of the first distros to release KOffice 1.5 packages. In fact they were available already at the release moment. Just see the announcement for links, or go to kubuntu.org.
That said, if you still experience crashes we would be very grateful if you reported them at bugs.kde.org. We actually do care and do read the reports, and have fixed many of them already just because they were reported.
1. Was this KWord 1.5 or an earlier version? 1.5 has had many fixes for OpenDocument and might very well work if you used an older version in your example.
2. If it WAS 1.5, could you report the bug to bugs.kde.org? If possible, attach the document, as this will make it easier for us to fix the bug.
Last, but not least, don't forget that OpenOffice.org does also contain bugs.