KOffice 1.6 Released

The KOffice team is proud to announce the 1.6.0 release of its office suite. This release is mostly a feature release of Krita and Kexi, but also contains major enhancements to the OpenDocument and MathML support of KFormula and new scripting functionality. This version also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning application. Download packages for Kubuntu, SuSE or you can try before you install with the KOffice 1.6 live CD.

The 1.6 release is intended mainly as a feature release for the two fastest developed components: Krita and Kexi. However, other components are being actively developed too, with astonishing results. The highlights of this release are:

  • Krita Becomes Usable for Professional Image Work
    Krita and its maintainer Boudewijn Rempt won the aKademy Award for "Best Application" at this year's KDE conference in Dublin. With features such as magnetic selection, effect layers, colour model independence and full scriptability, it has risen to become what is probably the best free image editing program today.
  • Lots of New Features in Kexi
    Kexi, the desktop database application competing with MS Access, is the other application in KOffice that is already the best of its kind. Kexi has received over 270 improvements since KOffice 1.5. With this release, Kexi gains such features as the ability to handle images, compact the database, automatic datatype recognition and Kross scripting tools.
  • KFormula Implements OpenDocument and MathML
    The formula editor of KOffice now supports OpenDocument and MathML and uses it as its default file format. It also surpasses the equivalent component in OpenOffice.org, scoring 70% on the W3C MathML test suite compared to 22% for OpenOffice.org Formula. We see this as one example where the work to provide a very well-structured codebase of KOffice pays off to create a superior support for the existing standard.
  • Scripting Support in KSpread, Krita and Kexi
    KOffice 1.6 brings scripting to a new level with scripting functionality in KSpread, Krita and Kexi. Scripting is provided through the cross-language script bridge Kross, which enables KOffice to be scripted in Python and Ruby with possible future extensions through Javascript and Java. With this release, KOffice also introduces command-line scripting where, for example, spreadsheet documents can be automatically manipulated with scripts to create many new usecases.

This will be the last non-bugfix release until version 2.0, which will build on Qt 4 and KDE 4 technology. For more information, see the full announcement, the detailed release notes page, and the complete list
of changes
.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by Max (not verified)

I will come back on you.

Maybe I'm writing a usable Lens Correction filter or try to port Mplayers high performance unsharp mask filter and bicubic scaling filter.

by Boudewijn (not verified)

I'm looking forward to it!

by Cyrille Berger (not verified)

> Should I write a vignetting and distortion correction plugin for Krita 1.6?
whats' wrong with the one allready included ? as for color adjustement, we only miss level, but then nothing prevents you to add it to 1.6, the change to 2.0 and Qt4 won't make it hard to port filters, for them, most of the internals of krita 2.0 will stay the same as 1.6.

by Max (not verified)

>> Should I write a vignetting and distortion correction plugin for Krita 1.6?
> whats' wrong with the one allready included ?

It's unusable. Have you ever tried to adjust more than one or two photos with it?
Hint: Take a digital camera with zoom and take 100 photos with different zoom levels and different apertures. Then try to adjust those photos with Krita...

Distortion depends on camera model and focal length. Vignetting depends on camera model, focal length and aperture.

Does this filter read those informations from the exif tags? No. Does the filter at least support user defined profiles (e.g. distortion correction for a some camera model at 35mm, 50, 80 mm focal length)? - No

For each photo you have to fiddle with at least three numerical values until it looks right.

How to do it right? Look at Bibble or just guess/calculate the distortion values from vertical lines.

> as for color adjustement, we only miss level,

"We only miss level?"
How do I increase or decrease saturation? How do I remove points from the Brightness/Contrast curve?
Suggestion: Combine "Color Adjustment" with "Brightness/Contrast" as nearly all other programs do.
How can I easily adjust the color temperature. "Click white point"...

> but then nothing prevents you to add it to 1.6, the change
> to 2.0 and Qt4 won't make it hard to port filters, for them,
> most of the internals of krita 2.0 will stay the same as 1.6.

As I wrote: Krita 1.6 is missing many small, but needed features and it does not seem those features will make it into Krita 1.5.x. And KDE 4.0.2 is still very far away (KDE 4.0.2 is the earlyest I and many other people will be able to switch to Krita 2.0) which unfortunately makes Digikam or Gimp 2.3.x/2.4 more appealing.

Btw.: Do you plan to improve the image preview in the filter dialogs in 1.5.x? Will it be possible to use Digikam-Image-Plugins in Krita 2.0?

But keep up the very good work(!) and don't let you demoralize by someone who would prefer an improved Krita 1.7 much more than Yet-another-kde-4.0-only application.

by Boudewijn (not verified)

I do hope I'll find a way to reuse the digikam plugins for 2.0; probably not the kipi plugins since Krita is not the application to manage your photo collection with. I tried for 1.5, but I got hopelessly confused by which part of digikam I would have to fake to make the plugins work: there is not a really clear interface that I can just implement for digikam to access krita's image data. Especially when selections come into play. I thought it would be necessary to actually copy Krita's non-rectangular selection data onto a new transparent image, and then send it to digikam's plugins.

You can remove points from the brightness contrast curve by right-clicking them (I believe -- I actually use Krita most for painting, not for photo retouching. That's more Cyrille's lookout).

by Max (not verified)

> You can remove points from the brightness contrast curve by right-clicking
> them (I believe -- I actually use Krita most for painting, not for photo
> retouching. That's more Cyrille's lookout).

Does not work here (Krita 1.6.0)

by Boudewijn (not verified)

Hm, then its probably another key... I know it's possible, I just don't ever get the time to actually do it :-). Maybe something for a thorough usability review some time soon before the next release?

by Casper Boemann (not verified)

simply select the point and press delete on the keyboard

by max (not verified)

Thanks, I did not see that it is possible to select points. The visual feedback is not easily to see. The lack of a context menu did ot help, too.

by caulier gilles (not verified)

Hi Boudewijn, how are you ?

There is a clear interface for all image plugins used by digiKam image editor and showfoto. Look the ImageIface class implementation from trunk :

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/graphics/digikam/utilities/imageed...

But since digiKam support 16 bits/color/pixel and advanced photograph metadata, we don't use QImage to store image data but a dedicaced container named DImg using a similar syntax than QImage :

http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/extragear/graphics/digikam/libs/dimg/dimg.h?...

If you need help to support digikam image plugins in Krita, let's me hear...

Gilles Caulier

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

I'm fine -- much better than this summer :-). I'd love some help interfacing between Krita and Digikam! On the krita side, all that's necessary is to create a digikam-filter filter plugin that converts the krita data to dimg data and back and that can access the digikam filter settings dialogs.

by Caulier Gilles (not verified)

And me, i'm very tired. digikam 0.9.0 is now in beta3 and we working hard to release final before Christmast 2006 (:=)))

There are a lot of new features, like geolocalization of picture, Metadata editing, etc...

The krita digikam-filter need to be linked with shared libdigikam.la library to running. it's not a problem for you ?

Ah, before to forget, i have tested last krita 1.6-beta1 release provided by Mandriva 2007, and i have found a little problem with PNG files : the text chunck are definitivly lost after editing. For photograph, this is _VERY_ important to preserve this data (easy to do using libpng) since ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick/digiKam/ExifTool use the same way to store EXIF/IPTC/XMP to this area like a bytearray. You just need to save in memory tese bytearray and rewrite is into target PNG file. Look "PNG TextualData Tags" list from this page :

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/PNG.html

Nota : the same way can be done if you want to convert without lost metadata from a PNG image to TIFF or JPEG file (and vis-versa).

Gilles

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

I wouldn't mind; it would be an optional dependency or something like that. The exif thing is for Cyrille to fix :-). I'll get back to you in a few weeks -- when you've had time to rest a bit. I'm generally speaking quite jealous of your coding speed!

by Caulier Gilles (not verified)

>I wouldn't mind; it would be an optional dependency or something like that. >The exif thing is for Cyrille to fix :-). I'll get back to you in a few weeks >-- when you've had time to rest a bit

Well digikam 0.9.0 final release is planed just before Christmast. We can talking about by mail directly without problem and when you want.

> I'm generally speaking quite jealous of your coding speed!

(:=))) thanks. Working on digiKam & co is very important for me (and for all photographs witch use linux, i hope)...

Gilles Caulier

by Cyrille Berger (not verified)

> How to do it right? Look at Bibble or just guess/calculate the distortion
> values from vertical lines.
Wow just telling me this without looking to shout at me would have been so much nicer :D Except that is useless as bibble isn't available for free, so I can't test it. And while I do a little photography, I never correct the distortion as my numeric camera does it automaticaly for me, so nice input on the plugins is allways welcome :)

by max (not verified)

> Except that is useless as bibble isn't available for free, so I can't test it.

You can test it for a month (or two weeks).

Just download the rpm or deb, it works on nearly every x86 or x86-64 distribution.
http://download.bibblelabs.com/download/distribution_list?download_data%...

Additionally the learning videos (on the same download page as above) might be interesting for you.

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

I would be the first to admit that cheerleading doesn't really help much. However, Krita is still a work in progress.

I hope that it has now reached the point where I can do enough work on it to help with the debugging efforts.

So, if it is usable, try to use it and report what doesn't work yet. This is needed since without a user base, it will only do what the developers think to test.

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

"Does at least the most basic filters (like unsharp mask, Gaussian blur,..) work with 16 bit? - No."

Actually... They do, mostly, but there was a spelling mistake in the code that meant that a warning was spuriously displayed when applying these filters to 16 bit rgba code. Fixed for 1.6.

by sebastian (not verified)

Can someone tell me how to do this in Krita?

I picked two colors. Now I want to fill a selection with a linear gradient where the one color fades to the other from one side to the other. The default gradient gives me something where the one color is in the center and the other at both edges and I simply can not adjust anything. The custom gradient does not seem to work for me.

And there is another thing: In Photoshop they have an infobox. When I start a gradient fill (or a line or whatever) with my first mouse click it shows the position of this first mouse click and the current position of the mouse as well as its relative coordinates with respect to the first click (including arclength, angle in degrees and rad...) Is there such a box in Krita as well?

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Hm, the custom gradient did work when I just tested it -- and the gradient Krita painted went nicely from left to right, from orange to green.

We haven't got an infobox yet -- but we would love to :-)

by Max (not verified)

> The custom gradient does not seem to work for me.

Works for me (Krita 1.6.0)

by forrest (not verified)

there are over 100 comments!!

Anyway...
I really hope Kexi does take off.
Kudos to all the devs!!

I also really hope KWord is da bomb in KOffice 2.0. I see it as KDE's potential 'killer app' (not mentioning Amarok, K3B, etc :)).

Cheers