SEP
10
2006

KOffice 1.6 Beta 1 Released

Submitted by Inge Wallin

KOffice, the KDE office suite, today released version 1.6 beta1. This release incorporates a number of new features, mainly from the Google Summer of Code projects, as well as a great number of bug fixes. It also signals the start of the feature freeze that always preceeds a release of a major new version, thus giving the developers exactly a month to fix outstanding bugs. We urge everybody that is interested in KOffice to install and test this version to make sure that the final
1.6 has a high quality. To see more details, you can look in the
announcement
or the
full changelog.

KOffice 1.6 is mainly a feature release for the fastest developing
components Kexi and Krita, but also incorporates
some some new features and bugfixes in all the other components. You
can look at the article about
the release of KOffice 1.6 Alpha to see some of them. The new
features in the beta are mainly that some of
the projects from the Google
Summer of Code were integrated.

The projects that were integrated into KOffice 1.6 were:

  • Emanuele Tamponi: A bezier curve tool with stroking using
    brushes and a new outline selection tool for Krita.
  • Alfredo Beaumont: Major improvements to OpenDocument support for
    KFormula.

The other SoC projects were integrated into KOffice 2.0, which is
being developed in parallel with 1.6 and will be released later in
2007.

Other noteworthy but smaller things in 1.6 Beta1 are tools for
perspective drawing in Krita, new filters in Krita, great speed
improvements in KSpread, Kugar Designer works again and countless
improvements in Kexi. To see some of them, look at
Jaroslaw Stanieks
blog

Comments

Of course testers are encouraged to report issues to bugs.kde.org.

By Jaroslaw Staniek at Sun, 2006/09/10 - 5:00am

Koffice is really getting interesting now.

By ale at Sun, 2006/09/10 - 5:00am

Does anybody know when (if ever) are kubuntu packages going to ship?

By shiny at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

Already up since yesterday I think.

http://kubuntu.org/announcements/koffice-16beta1.php

By anononymour at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

>:(
I'm obviously blind. Thx!

By shiny at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

I don't even know where to start to install this on Mandriva. Please help. :(

By ac at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

If Mandriva doesn't have pre-packaged binaries (rpm's), then you'll have to build it straight from the source code. Google might help, and asking around on the mandriva irc/forums may also help. goodluck.

By Vlad at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

If you are running Cooker, type into a root console:

]# urpmi koffice --auto --no-verify-rpm

If you are running an older release you should compile yourself or keep running updates until its released. Its best to wait for Mandriva rpm releases anyhow so you dont go accidentally breaking other things at the same time.

By Peter at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

Is there going to be some major work on Kword's table support? That is one think that I really think should be worked on for the next release...

By Scott at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

Yes, version 2.0 will contain a totally new implementation of tables. 1.6 does not have any new stuff in KWord, only some bugfixes.

By Inge Wallin at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

Phew... That's one think I find really annoying. I'm really glad it's goign to be majorly worked on/fixed in the 2.0 release...

By Scott at Fri, 2006/09/15 - 5:00am

That and linenumbers and KBibTex-integration :)

By Carsten Niehaus at Wed, 2006/09/13 - 5:00am

Are there going to be "Klik" packages of this release? I think Klik is the fastest and easiest way to temporarily install software without messing up my installation.

By ac at Mon, 2006/09/11 - 5:00am

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE someone get a klik package for Koffice 1.6b... I would love to help test the software and do bug fixes, and klik is BY FAR the easiest way to do that.

Bobby

By Bobby at Thu, 2006/09/14 - 5:00am

I was hoping there might be some Karbon changes list in the changelog but sadly not but I did notice something I hope can be added to all of Koffice:

KPresenter
* kpresenter can be built stand-alone

What are the chances of this being done for all the Koffice applications?
(Alternatively what level of difficulty would it be to do the same for Karbon, maybe I'd try doing it as a last resort?)

By Alan at Tue, 2006/09/12 - 5:00am

Hmm, generally it's not that difficult to build the applications standalone. You need the libs, so after configure, do:

cd lib
make install

then if you just want one application, go into its directory and build it, like:

cd ../kspread (say)
make install

If you also want the import/export filters, then you have to build them too:

cd ../filters/kspread
make install

And that's it. Note, that for kchart, you also need to make install in interfaces/, and you might need to go into servicetypes/ and make install to get mime types installed.

By Inge Wallin at Tue, 2006/09/12 - 5:00am

You might also need to make install in servicetypes/ and mimetypes/ other than libs/ as a general dependency.

By Bart Coppens at Tue, 2006/09/12 - 5:00am

Most koffice applications are independent, you can use the environnement variable DO_NOT_COMPILE="kword kspread k..." before calling the configure script to select applications you don't want to build. And there is nothing new in karbon in 1.6, because the authors are doing a massive rewrite of the application for 2.0.

By Cyrille Berger at Tue, 2006/09/12 - 5:00am

Krita is really looking very promising.
This perspective grid is very interesting and I can think of several uses for it quickly.
Now what Krita needs to make it a real killer app is implementing better "natural drawing" tools (something like openCanvas, mostly proper watercolors and a decent pencil simulation) and it'll be my drawing tool of choice without a second thought.
Go for it, you sure are improving!

By Random dude at Thu, 2006/09/14 - 5:00am

I don't know OpenCanvas, but natural drawing tools are exactly what I want to work on. Unfortunately, you need a whole infrastructure setup before you can do that sort of thing. We're getting there, though.

By Boudewijn Rempt at Thu, 2006/09/14 - 5:00am

OpenCanvas is a very nice painting application (mostly with a japanes community from what I have gather), with a quiet unique feature, you can record the strokes and drawing operation, and then replay them on a different computer. But, unfortunately there is no demo of it :'(

By Cyrille Berger at Thu, 2006/09/14 - 5:00am

Er, I just found a trial version of it. Doesn't run under wine, though.

By Boudewijn Rempt at Thu, 2006/09/14 - 5:00am

Uh, got late to reply to this...ahem.
Well, I was able to make it run in wine, sort of using the defaults in the lastest version. It wouldn't recognize pressure pressure from tablets(for that I use vmware player) but it's enough to check out or watch "replays".
An vmware setting is recommended, it runs perfectly and can use the tablet's pressure.
Best regards Mr.Rempt.

By (same) Random dude at Sat, 2006/09/16 - 5:00am

I was hoping that Kword could now save Document Structure list size right, after closing Kword. And Kword paper sheets could have space between them, like OpenOffice has.

Well... Still very nice beta :-)

By Fri13 at Fri, 2006/09/15 - 5:00am