Koffice 1.3 Released

perbert writes "On January 27th, the KDE Project released KOffice 1.3 for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office."

Too many office choices on Linux now!

[ChiralSoftware]

Let's see, OpenOffice, Textmaker, Microsoft Office, KOffice, Kingsoft... what else? It seems that there are now more office choices for Linux than for Windows. Fortunately all except Microsoft Office seem to be moving towards the StarOffice XML format so we can have one file format that works on all of them.

I really enjoy KDE thanks for the great job people

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to admit that KDE is getting better and better with every release. It's good to see that the leading Open Source Desktop is having such a huge success. I like it's simplicity, easy to use. Not to mention that it's in many parts better than Microsoft WindowsXP or similar solutions.

GNOME is also a nice Desktop solution but has a very long way to reach the same functionality, integration, quality and easy to use as KDE offers today. The developers should start making it stable and usable for the endusers rather than 'hacking' around in it with no serious visible target for the enduser.

Lightweight ?

[koh]

And what exactly do you call a "lightweight" office suite ?

Any office suite without the clippy thing ? ;)

MS Filters

[Krafty Koder]

"the support for Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 97 documents has become much better." Guys (and girls) in the KOffice team - i'm not interested in those formats. I'm a KOffice fan big time, but I want MS Office 2000 filters at the very least. May I suggest that instead of adding features, the team focuses on filters for the next release. I can't understand why this hasnt been done - especially since OpenOffice can do it. I love the speed of KOffice on KDE - but I'm still stuck with OO as a result of this MS filter issue.

Re:This can only be a good thing

[gr8_phk]

Oh sure. When people use or try to improve GNOME, they are flamed because KDE is obviously superior and has won the competition. Yet KDE fans are supposed to support KOffice when clearly OpenOffice.org has won that competition.

FANatics...

Re:been using openoffice

[$calar]

Your opinion is the common one I think. But I think that OOo tends to be bloated and slow on my system. It's a great suite with many features, don't get me wrong, but I think that a more integrated solution is necessary. I have been using Abiword because it's pretty light on startup time and looks good with my GNOME interface. Yes, OOo is going to be having the native widget set, but will that lead to reduced startup times? Probably not.

Yeah, Abiword has its problems, but I think it's better in the long run (for me). I think KOffice isn't as mature as GNOME Office (Maybe with 1.3, this statement is wrong), but I think people are putting a lot of stock in OpenOffice and I'm not totally impressed.

Open Office Environment

[Mod Me God]

OO seems to have a foothold in xplatform (critical mass?) support, now a KOffice resurgence.

But could someone outline the principal benefits of KOffice over OpenOffice or vice versa? In what way are these better than MS Office (functionality not price) for an office product implementation?

Having a choice is great, but I'd prefer the best features, and as with all type-2 errors if I don't know what I'm missing, I don't miss it.

Re:I don't quite get...

[Just Some Guy]

My understanding is that it's not so much the file parsing that's difficult, it's fitting the resulting data into your application's object model. The KOffice people may have a good understand of the Office format, but it may not be a perfect fit onto their internal data structures.

Re:I don't quite get...

[not_cub]

I'm no expert, but considering OpenOffice can already open these file formats quite well (they are old), why does KOffice lag behind? I can understand difficulty in writing these files, but for reading them it shouldn't be nearly as difficult. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer the formats from scratch; they can simply read using the method from the GPLed OpenOffice code. Why the difference exactly?

Perhaps reading the files themselves isn't as hard as mapping them onto your own representation of a document. OpenOffice seems to have been reasonably like Office from the time I first saw it around '99 I believe (as StarOffice). KDE is effectively a design from scratch, although various things come out working similarly, because they are reasonable design decisions. As a consequence, even though the open world knows the data format of Word files to a large extent, reading them into KOffice is still hard.

This wild guess bought to you by not_cub.

Re:Speculation

[Florian]

I doubt that. Apple already has its own presentation program and therefore no use for KPresenter. Despite having greatly processed, KWord still doesn't feel like a production app, has an overally awkward user interface, much inferior import filters to OpenOffice and, at least in the past, insufficient stability. It is therefore not nearly as attractive as the base of a potential "iWord" as KHTML was for Safari. Abiword, which would be an alternative, also lacks reliability and compatibility, and OpenOffice is a monster that Apple would avoid for the same reasons it avoided Mozilla.

Also, KWord is built on top of KDE's component/toolkit architecture that is a world apart from MacOS X Carbon/Cocoa API. While Qt allows a native port to Aqua, it does not offer a native port to Carbon or Coca, and Apple is unlikely to establish a third desktop API on its platform just for the sake of getting a functionally rather limited word processor that, at the moment, has no dramatic advantage over the old Claris/AppleWorks offering.

And keep in mind that for Safari, Apple just used the engine (KHTML) of a free program, not the GUI application (konqueror) itself, in the same way it put its own (proprietary) GUI on top of Mach and BSD. From I experience, I doubt that KWord and Abiword are, in their present state, as attractive as "engines" as BSD and KHTML were. If it all, Abiword seems a more likely candidate since it's designed as a cross-plattform application and, quite in opposition to KWord, focuses on getting base functions and usability right before acquiring more nifty/hackerish features such as frame-based page layout and importing PDF files.

What makes your scenario very unlikely in the end are licensing issues. KOffice and Abiword are GPLed code and thus would require Apple to release any program based on them under the GPL. Which doesn't fit to the company's successful tactics of putting slick, but proprietary GUIs on top BSD- or LPGL-licensed hacker code like BSD and KHTML. A GPLed "iWord" that could be ported back to Linux and even Windows would, unlike the current i-apps, be no exclusive selling point for MacOS X.

-F

Re:Open Office Environment

[Angst Badger]

I'd hate to see either OO or KOffice achieve dominance. Indeed, why would anyone see that as desirable? The goal is to have a common file format, not applications monoculture. We already have that with Microsoft.

The whole office suite idea is flawed and only serves to line the pockets of commercial office suite producers and to create a winner-takes-all (and user-gets-screwed) environment. If it suits my particular preferences and needs, I ought to be able to run the word processor from KOffice, the spreadsheet from OpenOffice, and some commercial charting program and have them all interoperate.

If we have interoperability based on open standards, then software competes on its merits. (With the understanding, often lost here on Slashdot, that the merits of software are a matter of individual needs and opinions.) Without open interoperability, we have vendor lock-in and monopolies.

Re:Speculation

[LMCBoy]

Since KOffice is GPL, they would be forced to open the source code to their entire application. It couldn't be where they take the LGPL KHTML and link things to it

I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.

Now, assuming you are not the CEO of the company, why exactly is this a desireable situation again? The above seems like an unequivocally bad deal for the community of developers, and I say, thank goodness the GPL prevents such shenanigans.

since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license

If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit? TT is gracious enough to allow free (beer and speech) usage of Qt for noncommercial uses, and their commercial license fees are by most accounts very reasonable. It isn't as if they are starved for customers.

You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development

What the hell are you talking about? Assuming you aren't referring to illegal MS application development, can you please explain this? How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?

Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking

[pyros]

Were Apple to do for Koffice what they did for Khtml, and why wouldn't they

As one poster already pointed out earlier, KHTML is LGPL, but KOffice is not. So Apple can't take the core of KOffice and build their own stuff around it without releasing it all under the GPL. With KHTML, they only released the changes to KHTML, but not the stuff built on top of it.

Re:Try both.

[teslatug]

One important thing that OOo has and that KOffice will probably never have is the chance to use essentially the same app across different platforms (Win32, Linux, SunOS, etc). It's sort of like Konqueror vs. Mozilla.