KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 Released

Moving towards the 2.0 release with monthly increments of
improvement-goodness, the KOffice team has once more honoured
its promise to bring out beta releases of KOffice until the
time is right for a release-candidate release. So, before the news of the previous
beta
has had a chance to scroll off the Dot news page,
we bring you this beta with many, many improvements across
the board. Incremental as it is, we think it is a genuine
and important step towards a final release. So here it is: full
announcement
and changelog.

Some highlights in the release announcements: loading of text
styles in presentations saved by OpenOffice.org is fixed, inserting an
image in a document becomes possible again and the first set of results
from the Berlin meeting
become integrated into KOffice. And, of course, plenty of bugfixes all
over! And the translation teams have been really busy, and many bugs in
the localisation support have been caught.

It's now possible to paint on mask in Krita:

It is really, really time to start helping the developers, by testing
and finding bugs, by writing documentation, by helping out with the
website or even by helping to get KOffice release ready by writing code
and fixing bugs. We intend to release the very first version of KOffice2
in a few months: so let's pull together and make this a great platform
for productivity software!

And... Next month you'll get another one!

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Comments

by Cyril Brosch (not verified)

Thanks for the answer.
I get your point and I understand the advantages of the new interface, and with the help of your examples I was even able to find some often used signs quickly - I don't want the interface to be changed.

But the problem are the signs from the user area: These are not many, but I need them often, and they don't have a description by which I could search them.
I think there a two possible solutions: In the dialogue box there could be a field showing the signs (+/- 10) used recently (I think this is in newer versions of M$ Word), or there should be a possibility to assign a name to the signs in the user area (or to custom all names).
Unfortunately I can't script, so I don't know whether such additions are complicated or possible.

by Arnomane (not verified)

Have a look at the Plasmoids in KDE 4.2 Beta 2. There is one that does what you are searching for: A nice character table where you you can browse characters and just click one character which gets inserted.

by Cyril (not verified)

:-) I know why I love KDE4!

by pleasedontpushm... (not verified)

I mean, it's quite sad. The passage to KDE 4 is likely a drop for a lot of good
apps, as basket is actually discontinued, k3b seems stuck, tellico ,kaffeine and quanta don't have even an alpha running in kde4.

And in the meanwhile, plasma breaks and gets reworked every month, many core features of kde4 are changing from time to time, the port of other apps is really hard (quite a lot of changes and not so much tutorials/doc about porting).

But... guess what? The office suite that almost nobody really uses (how much tutorials for krita or karbon are in the web, how much compatibility with oasis standards???!?) is getting developed. Much more than the great apps above. And
guess what? There isn't a better, or even on-pair alternative for any of those,
while Openoffice still rocks.

by Anon (not verified)

"why koffice?"

Because the developers of KOffice want to work on KOffice; simple as that.

by RGB (not verified)

I use krita a lot. It is a wonderful app. Being a photographer, the only-8-bits of gimp are useless for me.
Koffice have antialiased vector graphs and support for otf fonts, something that OOo don't have.
Kpresenter 2 will have support for two monitors out of the box, in OOo you need to use an unstable extension.
Kpresenter 2 will have multimedia support through phonon, in OOo you need to use the outdated "java media framework" (I'm talking about Linux) or the unstable go-oo based builds.
Kword 2 will match (more or less) Writer in styles management.
...
May I continue?
OK, I'm a Writer power user and know quite well that Kword 2.0 will not fit my needs... yet, but considering the evolution of both, OOo --which started from the full featured code of staroffice 5.2-- and Koffice --which started from scratch years later-- I may say that Koffice project is a "must".

by doh (not verified)

Ehm, gimp has more than 8 bits from 2.6 ,so you can finally use a real photo
app now (there's even sox actually).

I tried (hard!!!!) to substitute inkscape with karbon to not need to install pango and some other gtk deps, I had to give up after 3 days.

Dunno about antialiased graphs or 2 monitor presentation, both kword and kspread
are ages behind writer and calc, and the compatibility is ridiculous.

by Torsten Rahn (not verified)

> Ehm, gimp has more than 8 bits from 2.6 ,

Nope. Gimp 2.6 is using GEGL for the first time in some way. However it still doesn't offer 16 bit color channels (the 2.6 announcement was a bit misleading with regard to this).

by Torsten Rahn (not verified)

> Ehm, gimp has more than 8 bits from 2.6 ,

Nope. Gimp 2.6 is using GEGL for the first time in some way. However it still doesn't offer 16 bit color channels (the 2.6 announcement was a bit misleading with regard to this).

by Fri13 (not verified)

You should whine (yes, whining) for Kaffeine, Tellico and other application developers than for Koffice developers. Unless same people is developing more than one, there is nothing to do.

I would like to see K3b, Kaffeine and few other applications ported KDE4 now, but because I cant code, I try to give my support by other ways, easiest and most powerfull is to report bugs and wishes what helps developers to enjoy what they do when they do not need to take care from everything alone.

by anon (not verified)

kaffeine and k3b are ported to kde4, don't know what distro you use, but they are available in opensuse's repositories and have been for quite a while now.

by ColinP (not verified)

No, they are both Qt3 apps; KDE3 applications running under KDE4.

by anon (not verified)

I agree with you.

Koffice is rather, awful. I downloaded the latest release, and it didn't really last long on my computer. The layout is a nightmare, and the whole look, awful. It actually reminds me in same ways about kmail, and that is, that they both look and feel a decade behind the competition.

I'm more excited about openoffice going to release a new gui for their office software, That might finally get me away from using Microsoft Office, but Koffice, I really wouldn't recommend it to anyone that I know. Sorry, but that is the truth. And it appears only a loyal few use it, the vast majority use OpenOffice. Even Lotus's free office software blows this away.

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

> It actually reminds me in same ways about kmail, and that is, that they both look and feel a decade behind the competition.

Bad example, considering the massive rework of message presentation in KMail for 4.2.

by odysseus (not verified)

Yawn! Yet more uninformed trolling by someone who doesn't understand the 'Community' part of 'The KDE Community'...

Kaffeine and K3B are being ported and are currently in alpha versions, it just depends on when their volunteer authors get the time to work on them.

Quanta last I heard no longer had a full-time paid developer working on it so of course the pace would drop, expecially as the underlying kdevplatform isn't finished yet.

Basket, looks to me like someone is working on it slowly, feel free to step up and help them out.

Plasma is _not_ being reworked every month, the underlying library code is now so stable it's in kdelibs, and the desktop has matured nicely for 4.2. If you're seeing plasma breakages you must be running the dev version, which means you have to expect things to be broken.

"many core features of kde4 are changing from time to time" - Like what? And is change a bad thing?

"the port of other apps is really hard" - You realise most of the porting issues are down to Qt? And it depends on the app really, and whether you just want a straight-port or if you want to take the chance to rework your architecture at the same time. You make it sound like you're a coder, so how's about telling us what docs are lacking, or better yet jump in and save one of the projects or features you're missing.

Really, the only sad thing here is you.

by mark (not verified)

I do not want to offend, and I think Krita goes in an ok direction.

Personally though I am more interested in how KOffice can work as replacement for OpenOffice. I hate OpenOffice. I think Abiword is better but Abiword lacks so many small things, and also developers. :( A sad thing the situation with openoffice ...

Now, about Krita, I think the usability seems a bit annoying. Can the windows be grouped instead of pop-up-ed? I hate those popup designs like Gimp. Gimp suffers a similar UI problem with those popups to apply filters. I rather use key combinations only to apply filters and would like to not popup any window (or if there is a "popup" i want it to appear in some right pane or so, where it does not distract me. A bit hard to describe what I want, but easy to notice what I do not want to have. Forced Distractions is something I dont like in general :D

Also, the elements all look very stylish but are they usable or customizable? Would be interesting to group elements differently and see if it makes a difference on the workflow.

Or in other words, whether Krita has some advantage compared to Gimp (i love and hate Gimp somehow.... you can do really nice effects with it. But the UI i really really hate, despite the improvements made)

by Andre (not verified)

The KDE developers are doing extraordinary work. Everything that comes out for KDE4 really looks great usability wise.

But the long development cycle of KDE4 (which is not yet finished). So I wonder what can be done to better scale the development community and recruit new persons. Is there a kind of KDE-from-Scratch project? Actually it requires quite a lot of experience to set up a development environment and when you happen to work on fedora be sure the development packages have other names etc.

I would really like to contribute but I don't even manage to compile KDE and I also don't want to shoot my productive system which I require for my daily work.

So I have e.g. a 16 GB USB stick. Is it possible to install a complete development environment on a usb stick? Software Development is real fun but some entrance barriers are there.

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

I'd be wary of trying to fit it on a usb stick: in order to compile KDE you're going to write lots of small files, which is not great on a usb stick. But an external hard disk you can boot from could be ideal. And there's a great tutorial on techbase on setting up a kde environment on your work machine with disrupting anything: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Increased_Productivity_in_KDE4_w.... Even though I'm a full-time KDE4 user now, I still use that setup to separate my production KDE4 environment from my hacking environment.

by Andre (not verified)

Great!

by freeman (not verified)

not bad but i think kde team should complete kde4 first:(

by freeman (not verified)

not bad but i think kde team should complete kde4 first:(

by freeman (not verified)

not bad but i think kde team should complete kde4 first:(

by vm (not verified)

I am having little success importing openoffice doc saved as odt - only a couple of lines are imported and then the rest of the doc is blank pages.

Anyone else seeing this ?