Calligra 2.9 Brings Biggest Krita Release and New Kexi Partnership

We are happy to announce the release of final version 2.9 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of changes which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.

What’s in the Box?

The 2.9 release is so far the biggest release for Krita, the award-winning free and open source digital painting application. Eleven out of twelve of the features were requested by users and funded by Krita’s first Kickstarter action and the twelfth feature will come in 2.9.1!

• Support for loading and showing multiple images in one window, and viewing any given image in multiple views and windows.
• Fully integrated the G’Mic set of image manipulation tools, enabling artists to, for instance, greatly speed-up their workflow.
• Greatly extended support for painting in HDR mode, making it a truly creative tool.
• New perspective painting assistants to new color selectors, improved transform tools and non-destructive transformation masks, brush engine improvements, workflow improvements, new filters, support for creating and installing resource packs (brushes, gradients, patterns) and many more.
• More details on krita.org

Professional artwork by David Revoy made with Krita (http://www.peppercarrot.com)

The debut of Calligra Gemini, a novel mix of a traditional desktop app and a touch-friendly tablet app.
It encases Calligra’s word processor and presentation apps. (details)

The same text document edited on laptop computer and in tablet mode

Kexi, visual data-oriented apps builder received over 150 improvements that make it extra stable and easy to use.

• Newer technologies have been employed for the tabular (data grid) views and forms.
• Report Designer, Query Designer and data import assistants have improved substantially. (details)
• All that is spiced with a dedicated support for KDE Plasma 5’s look and feel.

New table view in Kexi 2.9

Unmatched integration: Displaying office documents in Okular, KDE’s universal document viewer. For displaying many types of documents Calligra Office Engine has been used, the same that forms a pillar of document viewers on Nokia N9 and Jolla smartphones, COffice Android app and more. (details)

Calligra document plugin for Okular
showing a DOC file

Dozens of general improvements in common Calligra features as well as Calligra Sheets, Words are present in the 2.9 series. For details jump to the Beta 1, Beta 2 and Beta 3 change logs.

At the organizational level awesome news is that Kexi gained a corporate partner, Milo Solutions! (details)
This internationally active software house is focused on cross-platform software solutions with special emphasis on the Qt framework, the same that forms a pillar of Kexi, Calligra and hundreds of other KDE apps. Milo's proficiency in web, mobile and design does not hurt too in this partnership.

To ensure smooth ooperation, Kexi maintainer Jarosław Staniek acts as a liaison in the FOSS space for Milo, something he already practiced 12 years ago with other companies when Kexi project emerged. The outcome for the community is noticeable; numerous works of the first fully devoted to Kexi software engineer from Milo, Roman Shtemberko, can be already found in the 2.9 release. (read Roman's experience) So far it looks like a perfect blend of creativeness, technology and cooperation.