KOffice 1.2beta2 is out, sporting an impressive number of changes, with improvements all around the board including substantial filter enhancements, footnotes in KWord, and templates in KSpread. "This release, which is available in
56
languages, includes
a frame-based, full-featured word processor
(KWord);
a presentation application;
(KPresenter);
a spreadsheet application;
(KSpread);
a flowchart application;
(Kivio);
business quality reporting software;
(Kugar);
and two vector-drawing applications (alpha)
(Kontour and
Karbon14).
Additionally, KOffice includes robust embeddable charts
(KChart)
and formulas
(KFormula)
as well as a built-in thesaurus (KThesaurus)
and numerous import and export
filters." Read the full announcement for details. Huge congrats to the KOffice team for their hard work and dedication, and kudos to Dre for writing the announcement. Wooo!
KOffice 1.2beta2 is Out!
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Comments
First of all, CONGRATS for a new release !
Second point. I always thought it is a waste of time to duplicate efforts
in writting filters for the different office suites (Koffice, OpenOffice,
Gnome office apps, etc.). I really don't understand why it is not possible to
have command line universal filters, and higher level front ends to interface
the filters with each application. But basically, one should be able to run
something like "doc2kword ms-word-file kword-file" from the command line.
And then the different applications would call this command with
appropriate/convenient parameters to convert files as the user requests it.
That would also help migration in the corporate environment. Imagine:
"doc2kword *" and all your ".doc" files get converted to a more decent format ;-)
I guess my question is: why is this not implemented this way ?. Lack of cooperation ?.
Or is there a technical reason ?.
Thanks,
-- Leo
Lack of time is the reason.
Or let me phrase it in another way:
Stay tuned, this is not a real new idea and the people are working on such concepts already, but no code has been done yet.
See also: http://xml.openoffice.org/standardisation/
You have already a command line tool for filters in KOffice. It is called koconverter.
Just try:
koconverter ms-word-file.doc kword-file.kwd
(the extensions are important!)
As for supporting wildcards, well, I suppose that someone could write a script around koconverter. However, I do not know of anybody who has done it yet!
-
As for your question about "universal filters", well, the problem is that is sounds easier than it is.
If you want to convert from format F1 to your word processor format F2 and you have a intermediate format Fi, you need filters for F1 to Fi and Fi to F2. If you have another word processor F3, you just need a Fi to F3 filter to convert F1 to F3.
At first glance, it seems to be easier than to write a direct F1 to F3 filter. However, someone still has to check that converting from F1 to F2 and from F1 to F3 work correctly. And if one of them does not, programmers are not as free as for a direct filter, because of the limitation of the Fi intermediate format and because that changing any filter to/from Fi has potential side effects on all other filters from/to Fi.
Another problem is to define this intermediate Fi format. A try is on the way. Only future will tell if it goes well.
Have a nice day/evening/night!
I am sorry but I have to ask...
What is that status of grammar checking? Are there any projects working on this? Are there any documents on this topic? If I wanted to help with this feature where would I go?
grammar checking is technically very difficult to do. and its (i think) different for every language. so i don't think you'll see it anytime soon.
(i never heard of an OSS project doing that, maybe i didn't listen well enough)
I've seen a few, and even used one (it may have been Public Domain, as it was many many years ago) that was very good. I seem to recall that there was at least one article on the subject (using a free, where free ~= Free) grammar checker in Dr. Dobb's Journal.
--
Evan "Listening to Hour of Slack"
The original Symantec grammar checker (Grammatik) used regular expressions and a Lexx type engine to check grammar.
It would appear that this type of engine could be written for any word processor. You would need the regular expressions for it to work.
If you want to see this, it is in WordPerfect 8 for Linux.
A better grammar checker would use YACC and this would be more difficult to write.
--
JRT
I compiled the latest koffice, fired up kword to create a doc that contained a table. While writing, I decided I needed another row in the table. Then, to my great chagrin & surprise, found that this is impossible to do! The requisite menu oitems are greyed out :-(
How on earth did this get overlooked in the QA effort???
Make sure you have selected cell(s), not cell content.