KDE Ships KOffice 1.2, an Integrated Office Suite for Linux/Unix

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of
KOffice 1.2. David Faure, KOffice
release coordinator and developer, noted that the release features "an
incredible number of improvements
". What with a truly great
new (English-only) thesaurus, enhanced scriptability of suite components,
WYSIWYG on-screen display, bi-di text, KWord mail-merge and footnotes, and
KSpread database connectivity, enhanced printing and new sorting functionality,
who's to argue? And let's not overlook the constant improvements in the
filters, though the HTML import took a step back to take full advantage of
KHTML's powerful HTML parsing in the next release. Karbon14, the extremely
promising vector-graphics program (with SVG support!), is not officially
in this release but many of the packagers have packaged it as well.
'Nuff said, read the announcement or head straight to the servers and check it out yourself.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by ian reinhart geiser (not verified)

The code has been there for some years, just not documented, or used.
Im running it on KDE 3.0.3 from SuSE 7.3 and on KDE HEAD.

-ian reinhart geiser

by Julien Olivier (not verified)

I had exactly the same problem using Mandrake 8.2 packages: I tried KDE-3.1 beta with KOffice 1.2 rc1 and KOffice 1.2 final and Kivio has the same bugs.
BTW, kontour and karbon14 don't work much better...

I think there is aproblem somewhere with some graphical function. Maybe in kdelibs or QT libs.

Could anyone using Mandrake 8.2 packages tell me whether they have problems too ? What about those who compiled KDE libs or/and QT on Mandrake 8.2 ?

by Biz (not verified)

This same problem has existed in the HEAD CVS for sometime now. I reported it to the koffice-devel list. Don't think much as happned to it as I don't believe many people are working on kivio. I think the line tool and stuff will work if you had an older copy of koffice and installed the new koffice over it. I say this because kivio worked for me until I deleted the entire directory I had KDE HEAD installed in and then reinstalled. It's ashame no one is actively working on Kivio, because I really see it as an important app and it's not too far from being very usable. Rotating and scaling of objects need added along with a few other things. Anyway, that is my belief as to why it's broken.

Cheers,
Jesse

by JC (not verified)

Yes you're right.
There is no active developer or maintainer on this app. (Kivio)
That's why, I proposed myself to work on it a few days ago on the koffice list.
Currently, I'm looking into the code. I'm trying to do a list of bugs, a todo list, and looking for a way to import/export from/to Visio.
But my pb is that I only have a few hours a week to work on it :(
Have a nice day.
JC

by JP (not verified)

Hi,

Maybe you're already aware of this, but here's a link to
a "Visio to SVG conversion tool":

http://vdxtosvg.sourceforge.net

Hope some people have the time and interest to pickup
Kivio again, its an important KDE Office tool IMHO.

Regards,

John.

by mart (not verified)

i had the same problem, not only in kivio but even in kontour; i recompiled all koffice and the problem didn't disappear. Now i think: it's a problem of the Mandrake qt package?

by Onno Hommes (not verified)

No I don't think it is related to Mandrake. I have these problems with both Kontour and Kivio in RedHat 8.0.
In RedHat 7.3 I had the same problem after I moved to KDE 3.0.3 and QT3.0.5. I have a feeling that QT3.0.5 is the source of the problem. 3.0.5 has some dramitic changes in comparison to QT3.0.3.

by Dylan Carlson (not verified)

I have the same problems under Gentoo linux, which if you aren't familiar, is a source-based build (meaning exactly that Gentoo builds everything from source, including KOffice).

All of my libs are of the most current versions, but I am not running 3.1 yet.

by Rk (not verified)

Not only is Krita not there - which to be expected, since it has basically been abandoned - but now Kontour is gone too! What, did it have to discontinued for legal reasons or technical ones?

by Me (not verified)

You got a bum binary. I've got Kontour 1.2 compiled from the tarballs.

by David Faure (not verified)

Krita and Kontour were not good enough to be part of the release
(krita isn't even in the tarballs, and I've asked packagers to remove kontour
from the packages, at least the menu entry).

Try karbon14, it's the upcoming replacement for kontour (not fully stable yet though).

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

BTW, maybe the best KDE drawing app currently is kpresenter.
Textrotation, groups, stacks are here _working_ feature - nice job!

Bye

Thorsten

by John (not verified)

There are some stunning examples of what Karbon14 can already do, here:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~rwlbuis/karbon/pics

this will be a worthy addition to KOffice when it's ready.

by Rk (not verified)

Yes, but its a vector drawing program. Kontour was intended to be a raster drawing program, like the GIMP.

by Anonymous (not verified)

> Kontour was intended to be a raster drawing program, like the GIMP.

You must mean Krita.

by Rob Buis (not verified)

Well I am pretty sure krita hasnt been abandoned, its probably just
lacking developers, like many other projects. Maybe something interesting to help out with?
Greetings,

Rob.

by MBuch (not verified)

Are there any plans to integrate a new version of KLyx in KOffice? By now there is Lyx 1.2.1 available and they are working on a GUI independent version, which seems to have got stuck a bit.

Tables are unusable in the old KLyx version (for serious work).

I believe that something like KLyx is missing badly on the Linux desktop.

MBuch

by Jos (not verified)

They don't seem so stuck to me

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/

by Peter Clark (not verified)

LyX is now GUI independent, as of 1.2.0. The only problem is that the only fully functional frontend is the xforms version. The QT frontend has progressed, however, and is almost ready for public consumption. The developer's mailing list has been quite noisy about QT, so it could be ready by 1.3.0. Behold a screenshot: http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~dekelts/lyx/qt.png. Note that it is currently using the default icons, but that these can be replaced.
:Peter

by opal (not verified)

yey!! when will it be out?

by Frank (not verified)

What about Kile?

Never used it, but the screenshoots look promising
(http://apps.kde.com/rf/2/latest?sid=8a015413f62d9f39a81a54bcbc964580)

by Asokan (not verified)

Kile is an excellent tool for another purpose. It is a source editor
for Latex that makes easier editing of latex source files and jobs
related to that. In factKile is the best of its kind. It can't be
compared with Lyx which is a WYSIWYG word processor that uses latex
engine

by Frank Rizzo (not verified)

Looking at the screenshots, it reminded me why I steered clear of KWord to begin with: the look & feel. The toolbar buttons would look so much better if the images were at least a bit anti-aliased.

Take for instance, the Italic and Bold buttons - simply difficult to look at.
http://holgis.net/kwordpic.jpg
KWord should ship with just one (max 2) toolbar with most used functions on there.

OpenWriter isn't much better, but an improvement.
http://holgis.net/openwriterpic.jpg

by Anonymous (not verified)

> Take for instance, the Italic and Bold buttons - simply difficult to look at.

Is this better? http://lists.kde.org/?l=koffice&m=101960245828281&w=2

by Jeff Dooley (not verified)

Yes... these are much better.

I also agree with the 2-toolbar MAX suggestion. But in reality, we should follow Sebastian's footsteps (http://dot.kde.org/1027587840/) and conduct some quick usability tests and post the results.

by Frank Rizzo (not verified)

Oh my god, these are so much better.
dFaure should run, not walk, to implement these.

by David Faure (not verified)

I maintain the code, artists decide on the icons.
Better write to the artists ([email protected]).

by kavau (not verified)

It seems to me that the improvements to KFormula are coming at a rather slow rate. I tried
1.2 and wasn't able to accomplish rather simple things such as writing a definite integral,
such as $\int_{x_0}^{x_1} f(x) dx$ in LaTeX. On the other hand, maybe I'm just too stupid.

For me it's a real pity, since I would love to use KOffice to prepare my presentations. But
a good formula is a must for me. Did anyone ever thing about embedding LaTeX in KOffice
documents (like having a slimlined LyX-style interactive LaTeX tool as a replacement for
KFormula)? A workaround is, of course, to create the formulas with LaTeX and then import
them as postscript graphics, but I think a lot of people in the sciences would benefit
from an integrated solution. And this could make KOffice the #1 office suite for science
people like me.

I don't want to sound negative, however. Overall, KOffice is a great tool!

Kavau

by Asokan (not verified)

This is true. The Kformula is far from being any usefull, although
other Koffice components have made significant improvements to the
point of surpassing other similar free office suits. Kformula is
terribly missing, particularly because people in the scientific
field are the major users of Linux and other open software products.

To make presentations pdfscreen package(grab from CTAN), to be used with pdflatex, is an excellent alternative. It can be used to prepare
excellent presentations, loaded with heavy dose of formula, in pdf format.

by Andrea (not verified)

You can add lower and higher limits for integrals:
-From MenuBar (Element->Add Upper Index)
-Shortcut CTRL+U CTRL+L

Bye
Andrea

by Mohammed Arafa (not verified)

hi
thanks for the great work but what about multilanguage support? like arabic is a left to right language and support for it doesnt seem to be very strong.

companies here refuse to switch to linux as there isnt any arabic support for the old ms word documents.

thx

From the Press Release:

Higlights
[...]
* Unicode / BiDi. KWord, KSpread and KPresenter accept non-latin1 Unicode fonts. KWord and KPresenter now feature full support for reading and writing bi-directional text, such as Arabic and Hebrew

Just check out the screenshots like http://www.koffice.org/kword/pics/kword-bidi.png and http://www.koffice.org/kword/pics/kword-arabic.png

Thomas

by Mohammed Arafa (not verified)

hi
thanks for the great work but what about multilanguage support? like arabic is a left to right language and support for it doesnt seem to be very strong.

companies here refuse to switch to linux as there isnt any arabic support for the old ms word documents.

thx

by Manfred Tremmel (not verified)

Is it a bug from the SuSE-Packages or from KSpread in KOffice 1.2.
Most files work in 1.2 as good as in 1.2rc1 or the betas bevore, but opening my list of Video-DVD's in KSpread from KOffice 1.2 crashes KSpread.
I've downgraded to 1.2rc1 and it works fine again.

Thanks for the response.

by Manfred Tremmel (not verified)

Sorry, heres the file.

I can open it without any problems.
Debian 3.0, KDE 3.0.3, Office 1.2, binaries from:
deb http://people.debian.org/~schoepf/kde3/woody ./

by Manfred Tremmel (not verified)

Thanks for the info.
Ok, another bug in the SuSE-RPM...
Maybe it takes 2 or 3 weeks to get stable SuSE-RPM's, like it was with KDE 3.0.3.

Works fine for me using KOffice 1.2 compiled from source.

No problem here with SuSe 8.0 and kde 3.0.2 and Kspread 1.2.
Maybe it is something lingering from the previous installation (of 1.2rc) ?
I did an upgrade from Kspread 1.1.

Works fine on SuSE 7.3, KDE 3.0.3, KOffice 1.2 all pakages from SuSE.

-Dieter

by Birger (not verified)

Wasn't there once a database application in Koffice called Katabase? I could use a database frontend like MS Access or Paradox for Linux. Does such a thing exist today?

by TunaBomber (not verified)

Try Knoda - It has a lot of MSAccess functionality using MySQL or PostgresSQL (if memory serves) as a backend.

I would like to see Knoda get a UI overhaul and become part of KOffice myself...