KOffice 1.4 Beta 1 Released

The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.4beta1, the first preview release for KOffice 1.4, scheduled for release this June. KOffice is an integrated office suite with more components than any other suite in existence. This release specifically introduces the database management application Kexi, the image editor Krita and upgrades the major KOffice components to use the OASIS Open Document format, an industry standard allowing better interoperability across applications and platforms. A KOffice Live-CD has been created and several distributions provide binary packages. Read the full announcement and the changelog for more details.

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Comments

by fyanardi (not verified)

Congratulations to all KOffice developers! And also thank you very much for your great works, I really love this office suite.

by Dario Massarin (not verified)

Me too! :-)
I really appreciate your work. Thanks, guys!

by Corbin (not verified)

You misspelled Kongratulations :-D

by taki (not verified)

... and You misspelled Your name, Korbin ;-]

by Colin JN Breame (not verified)

IMHO, koffice is more important that openoffice, and I look forward to seeing 1.4 with hightend anticipation.

by André (not verified)

Both projects are wonderful. Great efforts.

by gerd (not verified)

http://www.kde-docs.org

Good document templates are perhaps even more important and the entrance barrier is VERY low.

by Jonathan Riddell (not verified)

Kubuntu packages are available at using this deb source.

deb ftp://download.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/koffice-1.4-beta1/kubuntu ./

by David (not verified)

Wow - nice one Jonathan. I'll head on over there.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Many, many, many, many thanks to everyone involved in KOffice: David, Inge, Boudewijn, Jaroslaw, Laurent, Ariya, Adrian, Thorsten, Nicolas, Lukáš, Brad, Melchior, Sebastian, Michael, Raphael, Dag, Tomas, Casper, John... and everyone I forgot :)
You guys rock!
KOffice is a little wonderful gem, too bad it doesn't get the hype it deserves... but I'm sure that the future looks bright. Go KOffice!

by JohnFlux (not verified)

And me! Always forgetting me!

Oh wait, I haven't done anything yet.

Maybe next time

by Kennet (not verified)

Are there any Fedora packages?

by Rex Dieter (not verified)

The kde-redhat project (http://kde-redhat.sf.net) has koffice-1.3.91 packages (in the unstable repo).

by Kennet (not verified)

Thanks!

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

I have here an OASIS OOo-ott-file (template file) that I can't open in kword-cvs. Should this work?

Bye

Thorsten

by David Faure (not verified)

Good point.
This makes it work:

[Ed: see attachment]

(i.e. adding application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-template to both X-KDE-ExtraNativeMimeTypes (comma-separated) and MimeType (semicolon-separated)).
It works as in: kword opens the .ott file.
Being able to really use an installed ott template when doing "New" is another matter though.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

works :-)
Does not look exactly like in OOo but the content is there.

Bye

Thorsten

by David Faure (not verified)

If you can share the file, I'd be happy to look into why it looks different from OOo.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Please look in your INBOX :-)
BTW, I don't know, if OOo generates valid files. It was only a problem which appears here.

Bye

Thorsten

by MandrakeUser (not verified)

Allright, I might be wrong. But I have a strong feeling
that this will be the a cornerstone release for KOffice.

Why ? Because of the switch to Oasis. Now KOffice will be
able to use the OpenOffice filters to import/export M$ documents
I would suppose. And this is it. OO.org is nice and everything,
but the user interface is much nicer in KOffice.

The great advantage of OO has been that "it just works." Meaning:
someone sends you a M$ document, and most likely you OO suite will
open and display it almost as intended by the monopoly. This is
important in the real world.

I still recommend OO to almost everyone. But this may change soon.
:-)

Kudos for the great work, and thank you so much!

by Ellis Whitehead (not verified)

As I understand it, the OO filters are unfortunately highly intertwined with the rest of OO, which is part of the reason why there aren't any OO command-line utilities to convert among file formats. Maybe the situation has improved with the 00.org 2.0 architecture, but otherwise I wouldn't expect to see any filter sharing with KOffice...

by behavedave (not verified)

I haven't used koffice in a while but I hope that the fixes in the filters for OO.org 2.0 are incorporated (at a code level rather than just using the filters as are) because the filters in OO.org 2.0 are such a great improvement. At long last my CV opens correctly in OO.org 2.0 which has never been the case before as it is heavily formatted, Infact I haven't been able to find a .doc that doesn't open properly yet!

One question though how come if RTF is an open standard then why doesn't it open consistently in all word processors? (Assuming that Microsoft's interpretation is correct as they control the format, at least that's the impression I get from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTF )

by Anonymous (not verified)

> I hope that the fixes in the filters for OO.org 2.0 are incorporated (at a code level

I don't think that this will ever happen.

by Andreas Lundin (not verified)

It is my understanding that RTF is a poorly documented format, despite being open, and that this is the reason different word processors interpret it differently.

This is probably one of the reasons why the format hasn't caught on as a standard document format.

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

The other problem is that many RTF import filters are quite picky sometimes (leading up to crashes of the application).

Have a nice day!

by Joe (not verified)

"At long last my CV opens correctly in OO.org 2.0 which has never been the case before as it is heavily formatted"

Crazy idea:
Make it work natively in OO and then export it to Doc?

That's what I did and it works beautifully...

by Martin (not verified)

No matter how intertwined the filters may be, it should at least be possible to instruct oo.org from the command line to start and run a macro that imports a document, saves it in the OASIS format and then terminates the app, no? In the worst case, you might have to use a virtual X server like Xvfb to prevent the GUI from appearing.

This conversion would take a while and load the whole oo.org memory hog, but this does not mean it could be included as an alternate filter in KOffice. The only thing the user would have to do is wait!

by ac (not verified)

Good idea, you create such a thing, please. And please report progress on this to OO.o, not here, since OO.o is not related to KDE whatsoever. Thanks!

by kundor (not verified)

He's talking about using OO.o as a filter FOR KOFFICE, which is a real issue since OO.o's MS-importing is so much better, so obviously it's extremely related to KDE.

Why the heck would OO.o care?

I'm not saying that such a filter would be the best solution -- someone is eventually going to have to go through OO.o's code and make sense of it all and rip out parts that should be in shared libraries -- but it's a good suggestion. No need to be a jerk.

by ac (not verified)

Why the heck would KDE care?

Seriously, as soon as you a familar with KWord's code (there are too few who are, as you know it needs more developers) it's far easier for you to extend KWord and its filters instead making yourself familar with OO.o (which is a far bigger beast) and working on that instead. Also OO.o will never be part of KDE or be advertised as such so every solution "for KDE" you offer through OO.o is pretty much useless for anyone running just KOffice and not OO.o.

But why even bother? OpenDocument is coming anyway now.

by Martin (not verified)

1. Disk space is free.
2. KDE does not hold itself above trying to interoperate with other software.
3. Reimplementing all of OO.o:s import (and export) facilities in KOffice is not easier than writing a short macro.
4. Why don't you take kundor's friendly advice, ac?

by ac (not verified)

1. You mean yours is free?
2. So by that you mean effort should be spend on software outside KDE now for that reason?
3. You imply that such a macro would be already possible. If so why not offer just it? Also reimplementing all of OO.o's import facilities is excatly what I'm NOT talking about, just simply someone spending sufficient time working at improving the existing filters is needed. Looking at the OO.o's filter code for that purpose is currently just a waste of time since the code is too OO.o specific. Just take a look yourself if you don't believe me.
4. Because it's unrealitic, and you shouldn't raise false hope here.

by cm (not verified)

I think he was referring to the "No need to be a jerk." part.

> 4. Because it's unrealitic, and you shouldn't raise false hope here.

Then again, it could be that you're fully aware of that and just being realistic. ;-)

by Martin (not verified)

> But why even bother? OpenDocument is coming anyway now.

By the way, do you have any idea what you are talking about? I thought not.

by anonymous (not verified)

Is it more stable now? Even some beginner (from me) one side KWord document brings KWord to nirvana.

I always like KOffice from it's startup times, from it's layout and the right functions for me, but it really feels unstable.

My system: Slackware 10.1, KDE 3.4, Koffice 1.4b1

KDE is stable as a rock, and even on older versions (Slack 9.0, 9.1, 10.0) KOffice was always unstable. This is sad because I like this program a lot!

by Anonymous (not verified)

> Is it more stable now?

Please try it and report any issues you find to bugs.kde.org.

by anonymous (not verified)

> and report any issues you find to bugs.kde.org

If I draw a frame, type some text into it (with different sizes, fonts, bolds...) and then KWord crashes when I move/resize this frame, something other must be wrong than *I* write into bugs.kde.org... sorry, this should every developer see by yourself.

My other apps are *a lot* more *stable* (in compare to KOffice, these apps are bugfree)

by Anonymous (not verified)

dot.kde.org is not bugs.kde.org

by anonymous (not verified)

> dot.kde.org is not bugs.kde.org

sure, but I discuss about KOffice and don't mind what you want to teach me. If you can't accept critics then Internet isn't your medium. So please stop.

And developers doesn't need bug reports when KOffice stop working around a 1/4 full page with beginner work (move frames,...), they should see it independently if the developers use his programs for 5 minutes...

by Derek Kite (not verified)

Indeed. If the developers experienced this bug it would have been fixed. Obviously they haven't.

Welcome to the sometimes incomprehensible world of software development.

Please report the problem and your configuration. Someone may be able to figure it out.

Derek

by Joe (not verified)

And Engrish, obviously, you can't write, so please stop.
Read words from page when pick up Engrish book.

by LMCBoy (not verified)

That's really uncalled for and uncool. So not everyone speaks the Queen's English as well as you do, so what? Maybe you don't speak the GP's language so well either, but I'm sure he won't deride you for it.

by Anonymous (not verified)

I tried to create a new frame, write in some random text, set some of it to bold, italic underline, change font size and font type and resize the frame/move it around and nothing happened.

Perhaps you could supply some more specific instructions on how you provoked the crash? perhaps you could place a sample document (ie. one with a frame in so that if you resized it the kword would crash) on the web?

Hope the problem you described gets fixed.

by Fast_Rizwaan (not verified)

Here i have Slackware 10.1 with KDE 3.4 and koffice 1.4b1, i don't have any crashes. Except for the first time when Kexi and krita crashed (perhaps due to no configuration file).

And 1 more crash I had with kword is with when i tried to save my file in OASIS file format (perhaps juk was responsible too as it was playing songs and we know what arts is). Next time I ran only Kword and NO CRASH AT ALL.

by kaviar spreader (not verified)

I've never had problems starting kspread before. I have a recent cvs (5 days or so)

$ kspread
kio (KSycoca): Trying to open ksycoca from /var/tmp/kdecache-perra/ksycoca
koffice (lib kofficecore): kspreadpart.desktop found.
kio (KTrader): query for KOfficePart : returning 1 offers
kdecore (KLibLoader): WARNING: KLibrary: /opt/kde/lib/kde3/libkspreadpart.so: undefined symbol: init_libkspreadpart
kdecore (KLibLoader): WARNING: The library libkspreadpart does not offer an init_libkspreadpart function.
koffice (lib kofficecore): WARNING: The library libkspreadpart does not offer an init_libkspreadpart function.
kdecore (KLibLoader): The KLibLoader contains the library libkspreadpart (0x812b700)

by ac (not verified)

> I have a recent cvs
That's the problem

http://bugs.kde.org/
That's the solution.

by LMCBoy (not verified)

actually, problems in CVS/SVN code should be reported to the appropriate mailing list, rather than b.k.o.

by James L (not verified)

Is this official KDE policy, as I typically run cvs, and report bugs I can reproduce to bugs.kde.org?

by Anonymous (not verified)

No, LMCBoy is wrong - what he says only applies to likely temporary compilation errors.

by Hayer (not verified)

When will Koffice 2 come out and what will the major change be? Full OASIS support?