KOffice 1.6 Released 186
ingwa writes "The KOffice team today released version 1.6 of its office suite. Among other things, this release contains an improved Krita which can now handle color spaces like CMYK. This makes it the only free image editor that can be used in professional pre-press work. Together with the other improvements, this release probably makes it the best free image editor in the world. The release also contains improvements in Kexi, the MS Access like database application, and a new scripting framework which makes it extremely simple to script applications that handle OpenDocument data. With this release KOffice also surpasses OpenOffice.org in some ways, e.g. it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML test suite while Openoffice.org only handles 22%. See the KOffice homepage for more information."
Kudos to the dev team (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Kudos to the dev team (Score:5, Funny)
I try to give it its due, and have often attempted to compose a praise-filled letter in KOffice, but it keeps crashing before I can finish it.
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Re:Kudos to the dev team (Score:5, Informative)
and, last time I used it, very fast compared to the competition. That counts for a lot in my book. "It's the latency, stupid!"
Openoffice draining KOffice (Hurd effect) (Score:4, Insightful)
Eventhough I still use OO.org 2.0, I've always felt that the codebase has the feel of having been through too many hands, have had too many cooks mix in all their special sauce (*cough* Sun... *cough* Java...), for it to leave a good after taste. But people still work on it and use it because it has the best MS Word .doc compatibility versus esoteric
features like MathML (@see LaTeX) - it is a chicken and egg problem of getting your users/developers and having
work done to get them (@see Hurd).
So, if there were on OO.org, I'd have estimated that Koffice would be much farther up in .doc compatibility than it is now. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
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Excuse me sir, but that is nonsense.
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Gnome version? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that even possible? It seems kind of dumb to port a linux application to linux.
Perhaps I'm way off base here.
Re:Gnome version? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shazam.
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-matthew
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I haven't explored the KDE/GNOME app mixup specificall
Have a question? No, Yes? (Score:2)
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Can you drag/drop between GNOME and KDE applicaitons? Can you copy/paste non-trivial (non-text) objects between them? These would be two big ones that I can think of off the top of my head.
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Because one is written in C and the other in C++, use different object models, (until recently) use different messaging systems, and otherwise have absolutely nothing whatsoever in common except that they both have the same general goal?
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I imagine you could port all the idioms (qt to gtk, ioslaves to vfs, kparts to bonobo) but by the time you were done, you'd have completely recoded it anyway. May as well start from scratch and target the OASIS document standard as Koffice does.
What would be nice is if you wrote it as a suite of cooperating DBUS components, since both KDE and Gnome are using it now. I imagine that itself would involve some major work, including quite probably
Re:Gnome version? (Score:5, Informative)
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Actually historically speaking Qt has been better supported on Windows than GTK and still is. There are actually two hinderances here: 1) In the past there has been no GPL license for the windows version of Qt (or Mac) but that has changed. Mac has a GPL version and Windows either has one or i
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While it is true that you can run any kde application in Gnome, the application will still feel like a KDE application, for instance the skin will look different and dialogs will have a different button positioning.
I know KOffice is fairly modular, but I don't think it would be possible to tie it into Gnome's UI libraries easily.
Both GTK+ and Qt use the same widget themes! (Score:2)
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GNOME does the same, except the part about cleaning up. Run a GNOME app on a box that you rarely log into, and you find a various GNOME daemons sitting around forlonly, like lost little children. Oh, little gconfd and gnome-settings-daemon! Where's your mommy? Don't worry, I won't hurt you. I'll take you to her right now.
% bonobo-slay
Right.
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Now with that out of the way, there really is no need to. First, both OO and Koffice are capable of running on either desktop. You just fire them up. Secondly, it would take a bit of work to rip out Qt and replace it with gtk. Instead, that effort could go into improving either or both of the projects. Finally, while OO does better on
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For people who complain about GIMP (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:For people who complain about GIMP (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really, because a lot of the people I know that use Pshop and other Win/Mac only photo software can't get the linux stuff to do what we want easily enough.
I need simple support for camera raw files, multiple (including uncommon) colorspaces, exif and IPTC/XMP support and respect, and better image browsing/sorting tools.
I am a professional photographer and have tried to put together a linux system that would meet ALL the requirements of the job, and have been as yet unable to do so. And I don't mean "I took a weekend" kind of trying.
Show me a combination of linux software packages that work as well as (not use the same cpu cycles, not use less memory, not play well with t'0pen s0-urse' file formats) or better than (that's where I get concerned with hardware requirements, hardware compatibility and system overhead) the industry standard Photoshop+PhotoMechanic+NoiseNinja (or some other noise correction software) combo, and I will be frucking amazed.
This actually raises a good question. I'm a professional photographer (news, commercial, portrait and event) and I need to be able to quickly and easily dump a CF card onto a computer, apply IPTC/XMP information to them while or after ingesting the photos, browse collections of these photos (.NEF [Nikon RAW file format], jpeg and tif files), and edit them in or convert them between industry-standard colorspaces such as (but not limited to) CYMK, Adobe 98, and of course, some flavor of sRGB.
Oh yeah, and the software/OS need to support hardware-level or equally good color profiling as well as a general high quality photo scanner, negative scanner (for digging into the older, pre-digital work) and photo printer.
So how do I do it?
PS, I am totally willing to help/advise an ambitious Linux zealot put together a Linux distro or software package that steps it up to the professional level. I and others would love to stop giving Adobe $800 every time they drop a new Pshop. I can't code, but I sure as hell know what needs to be accomplished with the software and am willing to help with look and feel. I'm serious.
Until there is support for the nitty-gritty necessary to the job, pros won't care and consumers will continue to use the 'easier' Win/Mac stuff.
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Yeah, I agree witih you on this. I am still looking for linux programs to replace irfanview and paint.net. I do not need (and certainly don't like) to use a beast like the GIMP to do certain small tasks, I am a game programmer and usually slightly modify (resize, crop, batch rename, change RGB colors, etc) images. But doing that with GIMP and other l
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For a simple paint/image editing program, I like kolourpaint. It's pretty basic, but it's a step up from MSPaint, and it does the trick for me.
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Digital cameras are sold by the number of pixels in the image file, not the sensor array. When you download a "3072x2048" JPEG image from your "6 megapixel" camera, what you're downloading may well have 6 million pixels in it -- but it has been interpolated up from the raw data supplied by the sensor. The JPEG compression hides the interpol
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However, it's good to state those requirements and desires openly, as hopefully some amateur photographer who's a good programmer will take up the challenge. By now someone has shot his sister's wedding on a 4GB CF card in JPEG format, and is staring at 10K pictures that need tagged, identically post-processed, and sorted. This person just needs a little encouragement to start coding.
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It's also available for the Mac and Windoze. The professional version, which I use, includes all three. Additionally, since I've bought it I can't count how many free upg
Kerning (Score:4, Interesting)
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From what I understand, this is at least in part a Qt 3.x issue, and will be fixed in Koffice 2.0 with the port to Qt 4.x. The big showstopper for me, and most people, is the lack of Microsoft Word support. See http://koffice.kde.org/filters/1.6/ [kde.org].
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KWord can import MS Word docs, I just tried and it works, although I have no idea why your link doesn't list it. It can't export to doc, but it can save to rtf (which is what AbiWord does to achieve doc export, they just save rtf output with a doc extension).
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For the lazy:
Application/ Import/ Export
Abiword/ Yes/ Yes
AmiPro/ Yes/ Yes
Applixword/ Yes/ No
HTML/ Yes/ Yes
KPresenter/ Yes/ No
Hancom Word/ Yes/ No
Magic Point Presentation/ Yes/ No
Microsoft® Powerpoint/ Yes/ No
Microsoft® Word/ Yes/ No
Microsoft® Write/ Yes/ Yes
Oasis OpenDocument/ Yes/ Yes
Openo
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Re:Kerning (Score:5, Informative)
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Abiword (Score:2)
Still, KOffice isn't really an option for me since it's not cross platform. I'll have to stick with OpenOffice for now. Hopefully with KDE 4 and KOffice 2 they'll add support for MacOSX (please, no X11) and Windows.
Windows Version? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anybody know if this is still the plan? I'd love to move back to Koffice.
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No the GPL does not, but Trolltech (you know, the copyright holders) restricted what source they released under GPL. Specificly, Qt3 for Windows wasn't GPL'd. In fact, they're still holding back a few minor things between the commercial and GPL'd Qt versions such as compiler support. There was a
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Any other pointless areas in which KOffice surpasses OpenOffice?
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You don't know what you're talking about. OpenOffice has a full-featured, integrated, mature formula editor similar to LaTeX and eqn.
The de-facto standard for mathematics input is LaTeX, with some MS Word, OpenOffice, and eqn thrown in. MathML use is non-existent in the sciences, and if it will ever amount to anything, it will be as a back-end interchange format that us
MathML (Score:2)
Yeah, like anybody uses that.
MathML (Score:5, Funny)
I do believe I just heard <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mn>5<
And you have no idea how painful that was to type in.
Packages already avaliable for Kubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
or, add these to you
* deb ftp://bolugftp.uni-bonn.de/pub/kde/stable/koffice
* deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.kde.org/pu
* deb http://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde/stable/kof
* deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/koffice-16 [kubuntu.org] dapper main
Re:Marketer alert? (Score:5, Insightful)
Push it... to what end? To make more money? It's all free! And my experience is that the free software guys don't have Marketing Rats, or at least none worthy of the name, else the products wouldn't have names like "The GIMP."
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And my experience is that the free software guys don't have Marketing Rats, or at least none worthy of the name, else the products wouldn't have names like "The GIMP."
I'm so glad not to be the only one thinking that. I like GIMP for some things but the name gives me Pulp Fiction flashbacks...and not to one of the good parts.
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It is? Then what's the deal with this: [www.kexi.pl]
Limitations of Demo Version
* No guaranteed technical support (reports and questions are welcome though)
* Maximum of 5 objects of every type (table, query, form) allowed per database.
* MS Access tables import: 100 first rows (practically, in random order) is imported for every table. There is no limitations for the number of tables th
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Qt 4.x changed that by also making available the free software version for Windows and OS X, but KOffice won't be using that until 2.x.
Also, commercial licences for Qt are kinda pricey for a small OSS project like Kexi.
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GIMP v. others is one thing. GIMP has lots of well known problems - discussed over here in Slashdot many times. (New imaging core [slashdot.org], GIMP v. Photoshop [slashdot.org]) More competition is better.
KDE vs. GNOME holy war is absolutely different thing: desktop environments are developed differently, targeted at two different kinds of users. Clashes are inevitable. And it's not a competition really - the user bases are almost not overlapping.
Same goes for OO.o vs. KOffice ODF tools. Normally users pick one tool and stick w
Re:Marketer alert? (Score:5, Funny)
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You misspelled . One currency sign certainly isn't enough for those greedy fuckers with their "internationalisation effort" and stuff.
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ASCII-compatible replacement, because i can't be bothered to look up the character codes: "Lao kip" "Vietnamese dong" "Euro".
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Right, but Qt is only half the battle. Qt was originally designed to work on Windows and Linux. While I've seen screenshots of KDE software running on Windows, I don't think it's in the same ballpark as Qt in terms of compatibility; KDE (as the name implies) isn't just middleware like Qt is.
I think the latest KDE on Windows is 3.1.4; once they get to be in parallel with each other (so
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Re:Marketer alert? (Score:4, Insightful)
At least they're competing on open standards. Sort of like Opera's race to get support for SVG-(tiny/full) into their browser ahead of Gecko etc. No embrace and extend bollocks ;).
I'm also pretty pleased to see another FOSS image editor doing well, competition does great things for the market, even when the market is free :). I'll definately be giving Krita a go soon.
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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.
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Re:What the hell is this crap? (Score:5, Informative)
"For the future it is planned to base GIMP on a more generic graphical library called GEGL, thereby addressing some fundamental design limitations that prevent many enhancements such as native CMYK support. However, implementation of this plan has been continually put off since 2000."
An eternity, eh? Apparently CYMK hasn't been in there long enough to get inclusion in the Wikipedia article. Also, are you sure you aren't just using the plugin? http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml [blackfiveservices.co.uk]
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Camera and scanner are not CMYK (Score:3, Insightful)
Your prosumer camera and scanner are not CMYK, which negates "from start" in a lot of cases. In addition, your computer monitor is not CMYK. Any intermediate view sent to a computer monitor will not be CMYK; it'll be a conversion, and conversions tend to be fallible.
CMYK was your mistake (Score:3, Informative)
1. only 8-bit channels
2. most code is ignorant of gamma
CMYK as an editing format is normally very wrong. If you use spot colors, then maybe WITH DEVICE PROFILES it is reasonable to do some work using the color channels individually. Don't ever get the idea of painting in CMYK, which is as defective as saving your temporary work files in highly-compressed JPEG.
The other thing you need for prepress work is a proper RGB-to-CMYK output conversion. This is speci
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The two are not even remotely comparable. That level of exaggeration borders on lying.
Your press output will vary based on the ink and paper you use.
It will also vary with the age of the printed materials and the lighting people look at them under. If you've worked professinally, you should be perfectly aware that it is ludicrous to believe that any technique will produce a 100%
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You do a good enough job to get paid, and you consider it low end? What does that make image creation for websites and such?
CYMK done wrong (Score:2)
Method one is RGB. Don't whine about the gamut, because there is wide-gamut RGB. Probably the nicest way to deal with this is an RGB consisting of the sRGB primaries as linear floating-point values. Things that would normally be out-of-gamut for sRGB
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Yeah? Can wide-gamut RGB distinguish between C0 Y0 M0 K100 and C100 Y0 M0 K100? No? It's useless, then.
Method two is spot colors. You edit the color channels individually. You see them in greyscale unless you supply a profile for CMYK-to-RBG conversion. Editing tools know nothing of the color; they ONLY operate on individual channels.
This is also utterly useless, unless you can compose CMYK in your head.
Method three, on the o
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Nowadays, some professionals edit graphics or photos mostly for the web. CMYK is not really a big issue when you're paid to make jpgs, pngs, and animated gifs.
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Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word import (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been a KDE fan ever since Mandrake 8.1, and later Kubuntu 5.10. It would be very elegant to be able to use KWord and the KOffice suite, since it integrates so well, and I can use the KIOslaves and take advantage of all the KDE features, including my favourite, completely configurable key bindings.
Nevertheless, KWord's inability to export to MS Word format is a dealbreaker. Not only don't they have a working MS Word export function, they don't even have a non-working one. They haven't started. There
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp (Score:3, Insightful)
I know interoperability is a key feature, but that's what we have OpenOffice for; KOffice is just trying to be the best office suite that it can be all by itself. It's that kind of focus that gives the project much of its promise. The article mentions that the suite surpasses OO.org and GIMP in many key features. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Also, now th
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Um
*thumbs*
Keep on trucking!
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Imagine a conversation like this:
Electricity board: We can supply you 230 volts, 50 cycles a second.
Customer: But I want 110 volts, 1
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp (Score:2)
I encounter this when applying for a job where the company insists that my resume be in ".doc format".
In these cases I save my resume in RTF, and rename it as
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I ask, because there's a few tools that HR departments are in love with lately that parse
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As I responded to another poster below, AbiWord doesn't export to .doc, they save as rtf with a doc extension (exactly as the parent recommended). Also, KWord can import docs and save to rtf. I have no idea if the import is better/worse than AbiWord or OpenOfice.org, but I would suspect that they are all very similar.
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And out of curiosity, how many of those jobs where you created your resume in Abiword have you actually gotten?
I think you should read this (as already posted by someone else): http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/Fa qMicrosoftWordDocuments [abisource.com]
"AbiWord can currently save in an MS Word compatible ".doc" format. This is done by saving as Rich Text Format (.rtf) but with a
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None... but then, I haven't actually applied to any. My sister-in-law's mother works in HR, and she's the one that told me about the software. Me, I'm one of those rare lucky SOB's who loves their job, gets a raise every year, lots of advancement opportunities, and works in an industry where there's no chance of ever getting laid off or downsized (they can fire me, but it's a meritocracy and they w
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Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp (Score:5, Informative)
Abiword doesn't really export to doc either, they just save as rtf and give it a .doc extension (see here [abisource.com]. KWord can easily save to rtf, and even lists it as "RTF Document (Microsoft Word Compatible)" in the save-as dialog. Maybe you can request that the developers add an option to automatically save as rtf with a doc extension, just like Abiword, although I don't personally consider having to change a document extension manually a "dealbreaker."
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp (Score:2)
Had a complete open spec for these formats been available, implementing of them would have been a lot quicker and all that development effort could have gone towards improving the suite as a whole.
KOffice tries to be the best it can, and therefore they're not wasting development time trying to reverse engineer a soon to be obsoleted file format.
In the mean time, you can us
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For a very basic version there's RTF, for everything else... well, ODF supports a whole lot of things that DOC doesn't, or at least there's no easy conversion. If the save to
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Hence things fire in a split second.
So for very quick jobs it can be neat.
OpenOffice takes ages to fire-up add Firefox to the list too.
Now for all you lovers of proprietory and closed-source software,
these guys used to code a neat fast loading Word/Excel alternative:
http://www.softmaker.com/ [softmaker.com]
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Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH
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It is a developing app with great potential and it will overtake the GIMP unless the latter actually improves its rate of development. At the moment it seems glacial, how long have we been waiting for 2.4 (which will still only have 8 bit colour)?
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That's harsh. For dumb uninformative comment which even doesn't link to the ChangeLog.
KOffice 1.6 ChangeLog [koffice.org]. It's pretty damm long for minor release. Search for Krita: it take 2+ PageDowns of my screen. That's pretty much for overview of changes and fixes. How ignorant you have to be to ignore all other improvements and pick that "icon set" change deep down. Which is probably simplest change of all