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  Kastle 2003: KOffice Developers' Meeting Report
KDE Office Suite Posted by Lukas Tinkl on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @10:32
from the next-version-will-rock dept.
Quite a few KOffice developers took the opportunity to meet during the Kastle event in Nové Hrady, and particularly to discuss the future of KOffice after the next major release (KOffice 1.3 slated for the end of September 2003). A summary of the topics discussed follows.

Topics discussed

File format

We will switch to the OASIS (OpenOffice.org) file format for all the major applications. This has many advantages:
  • file format shared with the OpenOffice.org suite, we don't have to reinvent the wheel
  • we'll be able to drop our OOo import filters and use the export filters as a compatibility layer for older KOffice versions documents
  • we can actively participate in the standard file format creation in the the case of Kexi and Kugar which are applications that don't currently exist in OOo
This is also a good opportunity to switch the names of our MIME types to the vnd.kde... naming scheme and to drop our KOffice-specific file extensions. It's again the users who will benefit from this step, e.g. on Windows it will be possible to open files created with a KOffice application using the OpenOffice.org suite.

KOffice libraries

We intend to break the binary compatibility soon after the 1.3 release and take this opportunity to clean up and refactor kofficecore and kofficeui libraries.

The next KOffice version will depend on Qt 4.0 which will have a better rich text engine that we will reuse. Our text library (kotext) will be redesigned as a thin wrapper around this rich text engine and will provide KOffice-specific functionality only. (David)

The scripting library (koscript), currently used in KSpread only, will be rewritten from scratch to provide a new light-weight formula parser. (Werner, Ariya Hidayat)

Kexi

It is still unknown whether Kexi will be released separately later this year. Otherwise it will definitely be part of the next KOffice version. The problem is that Kexi's core API isn't stable enough yet so it makes no sense to do a separate Kexi release which would depend on already obsolete KOffice libraries. (Lucijan)

KChart

Big thanks go to Kalle who finally imported KDAB improvements and fixes into KOffice CVS.

Scripting, automation

We decided to use kjsembed engine as a foundation for the new KOffice internal scripting engine. It will allow users to write their own wizards, interactive forms or scripts using JavaScript and Qt designer forms. Work is also being done on KDevelop side which will provide an IDE these tasks. (Zack)

Spellchecking

Current plans are either to rewrite the current API after KOffice 1.3 and KDE 3.2 releases or to reuse the newly born Enchant backend neutral spell checking engine. This architecture will have 3 layers: different backends, a core library and dialogs. (Zack, Laurent Montel)

Common canvas library

The plan is to have a common canvas class that KOffice applications could reuse for their own drawing needs. Currently there exist different implementations in Karbon14, KPresenter and KSvg. The goal is to have a common library so that also other applications can draw various shapes without the overhead of KParts embedding. (Rob, Lukas, David)

Ongoing work

The KOffice developers are currently busy fixing various issues so that we can ship a stable release candidate at the end of this month.
  • fix spell checking (Zack, David)
  • checking that language property is being used for different portions of text (David)
  • fix the character (font) dialog in KWord and KPresenter (David, Lukas)
  • continue KPresenter bug hunting (Lukas)
  • discussions about future drawing objects and common canvas functionality (see above)
  • discussion on table-frameset design (KWord developers)
  • Kexi hacking (Lucijan, Joseph, Holger)

Developers present at the meeting

Lukáš Tinkl (release manager, KPresenter)
David Faure (KWord, libraries)
Werner Trobin (libraries, filters)
Zack Rusin (filters, spell checking)
Lucijan Busch (Kexi)
Joseph Wenninger (Kexi, Kugar)
Alexander Dymo (Kugar)
Andrea Rizzi (KFormula)
Thomas Zander (KWord)
Rob Buis (Karbon14)
Holger Schroeder (Kexi)

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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
KJSEmbed hits the big time
by Richard Moore on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @11:23
Nice to see you've decided to use KJSEmbed. Feel free to make feature requests.

Rich.
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Great ida!
by Alex on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @11:30
I am totally for using the OO.org format, it has tremendous advantages.

The more applications usinte and use the format the stronger we will bea gainst MS's and it also allows greater compatibiltiy with our own appliations and other platforms.
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Status of Wv2 ?
by Charles de Miramon on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @12:23
I'm wondering what is the status of the new import / export MsWord library that Werner Trobin is working on ?
Importing seems to work already quite well but is exporting still a distant dream or can we expect at least basic exporting in a non-too-distant future ?

Cheers,
Charles

PS: switching to Oo formats is a very intelligent move
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depending on Qt 4 ?
by aleXXX on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @12:33
i.e. the next koffice version (1.3) will be the last which works with KDE 3, and KDE 4 ain't even scheduled yet (AFAIK)

Bye
Alex
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QSA and kjsembed
by panzi on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @13:50
I wonder what's the difference between QSA and kjsembed.
I know kjsembed adds some nice features, but else it's compleat the same? Eaven the cpp source? If that's true, why is kjsembed LGPL and QSA GPL?
I'm confused.

(And when will KDevelop support JavaScript?)
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:-O
by yg on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @14:13
looks like this has been read: http://www.mind.lu/~yg/office.html

... ;-)

so now we gotta convince Abiword and Gnumeric developers...
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KOffice separated from KDE ?
by Philippe Fremy on Tuesday 26/Aug/2003, @19:38
KOffice plans to switch to Qt4. But KDE has not planned this yet, as far as I know. This means that future version of KOffice will be independant of KDE ?

Also, beware that such huge rewrites have killed more than one project. Gnome has been stopped during two years just to switch to Gnome 2 and the same situation occured during the KDE1 KDE2 switch.
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Why not use the OpenOffice MSOffice filters?
by CPH on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @02:50
I know it would involve some work getting these filters into a reasonably independent state from OOo, but at least this way you would have both an import and an export filter. I'm sure that the OOo and Abiword people would be interested in this.
Also since all of the important office suites for the desktop would be using the same filter code, it can only improve the filter.
My 0.02 c

CPH
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Whats up with the KDE.org home page?
by defaced on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @03:03
Did anyone notice it yet? http://www.kde.org takes me to a page which protests against software patents.
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Will printing in Karbon14 fixed before KOffice 1.3
by Dieter Nützel on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @10:53
I only get "wire frame" printings and my nephew is not very excited...;-)

Try printig preview.

Thanks for GREAT work!

-Dieter
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KWord printing
by James Richard Tyrer on Wednesday 27/Aug/2003, @14:34
I see nothing about fixing the 'bassakwards' WYSI-not-WYG printing in KWord.

Is this a priority? Is work being done on it?

I realize that part of the problem is Qt::qpsprinter, but this has to work!

A wordprocessor that doesn't print correctly is useless for most purposes.

As was discussed on <koffice-devel@kde.org>, the current system tries to duplicate on paper what is displayed on the screen (it FAILS, but even if it succeded it would not be good) rather than making a very good (but not perfect) lower resolution +/- one pixel representation on the screen of (exactly) what will appear on the paper.

--
JRT
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KWord - horrible Table support
by Christoph on Thursday 28/Aug/2003, @06:55
I have benn using koffice(eg kword and kspread) for some time now for really small things.

kspread is really useful and works well. thumbs up.

kword is very nice for simple "word" documents, but the table support is so bead it makes my head split every time i use it :

- You never know what your table looks like if you save your document and load it again.
-cells are lost
-contents of cells is gone
-you cannot select a table *
-you cannot move a table around *
-you cannot resize a table *
*=these points work somehow, but its so bad no one will ever be able to use kword tables ;-) you really have to rethink the way tables are handled in kword.

Mfg Christoph
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Article on Slashdot
by MandrakeUser on Thursday 28/Aug/2003, @08:59
This article has been reproduced in Slashdot
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/27/2223227&mode=nested&tid=106&tid=121&tid=185&tid=189
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OpenOffice.org file format
by a on Thursday 28/Aug/2003, @14:27
This is excelent news!!! I always wished KOffice was compatible with OpenOffice.

Congratulations to the KOffice team for this decision!!!
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Webpage theme
by Alex on Thursday 28/Aug/2003, @23:54
Could somebody change te default KDE webpage-style.
The Yellow-style looks much better.
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Vector drawing!
by Praedor on Sunday 31/Aug/2003, @17:28
Without a really useful vector drawing app the office suite is incomplete. Karbon14 simply isn't an appropriate replacement for kontour. Users of drawing apps have simple expectations and karbon14 fails to meet the most basic: the ability to draw simple lines, polylines, arrows (lines with arrow ends), etc. Such an ability is in ALL other drawing apps on the planet: OODraw, SODraw, Illustrator, CorelDraw, KONTOUR, Freehand, MacDraw, etc, etc. The odd man out here is Karbon14 which has replaced lines with sinewaves and nautilus shells (!?). What POSSIBLE use outside some very specialized need are these "lines"? Useless for 90%+ of those doing drawings for publications, books, or presentations.
Kontour was nearly there. It had almost everything necessary except a few more export/import filters and stability. Karbon14, nice in theory, is nearly useless in practice. You will NOT win officesuite converts by providing some bizarro drawing app that is totally at odds, interface and function-wise, from every single other professional drawing app out there. Either karbon14 needs a lot of work (someone forgot simple lines?) or it is simply not designed to be a widely useful drawing app and should not be part of the koffice suite.
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KPlato?
by lion_fui on Monday 01/Sep/2003, @21:57
What about KPlato? Is it dead?
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Kivio?
by Anthony on Thursday 04/Sep/2003, @16:37
I didn't see any mention of Kivio, and I surely hope this doesn't mean it is going away. I am a big user of Visio, and would love to get away from it just for doing network diagrams. I have tried Kivio in the past (even purchased some extra templates) but it was just not stable enough for my needs. I don't want to use the TheKompany version if the free version can really move forward. Is anyone still working on this project ? (and don't simply tell me I should, I am not much of a programmer really, and unfortunately my time to do Linux stuff is very limited).
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