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KOffice 1.4 Released 272

Posted by timothy from the good-move dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KOffice 1.4 for Linux and Unix operating systems. This release is a large step towards embracing the OASIS OpenDocument file format which has become an approved standard for office file formats. This format is also used by the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0, thus providing high interoperability. New applications in the 1.4 release: Krita - a pixel based image manipulation application (screenshots, movie) and Kexi - an integrated data management application (screenshots)."
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KOffice 1.4 Released More

KOffice 1.4 Released

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  • MS Office (Score:5, Funny)

    by Beuno ( 740018 ) <argentina@nospAM.gmail.com> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:21PM (#12884808) Homepage
    Yay!
    Now we only have to wait til 2020 for MS to release MS Office with support for Oasis, que it's compatibility all around us!

    • Re:MS Office (Score:5, Informative)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:34PM (#12884922) Homepage Journal
      Interestingly, KOffice was hampered a bit by the fact that Oasis doesn't address some of the file types that KOffice uses. When possible, they used them, but until OO.o 2.0 is out, there's no final standard, and even then there will be no standard for some file formats. Hopefully the OASIS format specs will distance themselves a bit from OO.o in order to provide useful specifications for a wider set of applications than ones that line up against OO.o.

      --
      Evan

    • Oasis in MS office could have been done a lot sooner, but the Gallagher brothers kept fighting.

  • What's the point? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by glrotate ( 300695 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:21PM (#12884810) Homepage
    All of the momentum and best coders are behind OpenOffice. Does the market really need a KO?

    • Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rob_Ogilvie ( 872621 ) <rob@axpr.net> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:22PM (#12884817) Homepage
      Yes. OpenOffice makes KOffice feel lightweight.
      • KOffice is lightweight, but perhaps a lightweight office suite is good enough for most people. Another way to consider the relationship between the two suites is to say that KOffice helps keep OOo lean.
    • MS Office is the one piece of software where MS really excels (I'd put Visual Studio a close second, and Exchange a distant third). If the Free Software folks want to challenge MS on that playing field, they're going to NEED to get behind a single product.
      • How about just a single standard format?
        Or what about a standard desktop?
        It's diversity that makes linux great. Not that it's free, but that if you don't like something you can change it. You can even publish the change so others who didn't like the difference can use your work and not reinvent the wheel. By giving people choices: KDE/Gnome, Vi/EMacs, Koffice/OOo; you are in fact ensuring that a larger base leaves Microsoft, because you have something that more people like. Not everyone likes everythi

        • Re:What's the point? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by BRonsk ( 759601 )
          I think you are mixing everything here. Diversity makes linux marginal. Because My grandma will not be able to help my aunt fix her computer, because she uses a different shell, a different WM, a different flavor of the same thing. What you dislike in Windows ("The same interface and settings for everyone") is what makes it popular. Because most of the people don't care to take time/energy into configuring the damn thing. You do because it's your hobby.

          For people (ie: The Mass Market) what is needed is som

          • Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @06:09PM (#12885572) Homepage Journal
            So it's marginal. That doesn't keep me from using it. Not many people drive Ferrari sports cars either... yet you don't hear many people complaining that Ferrari is being prevented from getting to the mass market.

            For just about every product there are a wide variety of goods, most of which do not appeal to the buyers of their choice. People who shop for the cheapest processed food cheese slices seldom also shop for aged bleu cheese. And yet both seem to do fine, and most grocers carry both. Is it shocking that there might be people who like Windows and people who like Linux and that they can (*gasp*) coexist? Or even people who like OSX, people who like BSD, people who like Solaris? Some brands will appear and disappear, just like certain brands of cheeses. Others will appear and be too niche for big grocery stores... you'll have to order them from gourmet places.

            But you seldom find people who like bleu cheese ranting that bleu cheese should be more like Kraft cheese slices because that "is what prevent[s] it from getting to the mass market". I don't think bleu cheese will ever have the market share of Kraft cheese slices. And I'm okay with that.

            --
            Evan

            • Not many people drive Ferrari sports cars either... yet you don't hear many people complaining that Ferrari is being prevented from getting to the mass market.

              That's not a valid comparison. Ferrari sports cars use the same infrastructure as any other car: the same roads, the same fuel delivery network, the same vehicle registration laws, etc.

              Right now, computers are much more like the railroads were a hundred and fifty years ago -- a mess of different, incompatible standards that don't work together, a
              • Yeah, 150 is just about right. Just when they were finally unifying on a standard gauge. Groups like freedesktop.org and OASIS are working on making it possible for people to make their own software choices, and still have their software interoperate with the rest of the world. It's about as close to win-win as it gets. It doesn't matter who builds your sleeper cars, as long as they hitch up and roll.
              • Ferrari sports cars use the same infrastructure as any other car: the same roads, the same fuel delivery network, the same vehicle registration laws, etc.

                Yes, and computers use the same roads (TCP/IP, usually over Ethernet or PPP), the same fuel delivery network (USB for data and IDE for storage, which wasn't the case in the early days of PCs), the same vehicle registration laws... okay, you don't yet have to register your computer...

                Seriously - using KDE, I can log into my bank, view a movie, type up a

          • Who are you fooling. Your grandmother couldn't help your aunt fix Windows, let alone DOS or any other Operating System for that matter.

            That's what grandchildren are for--to lend a hand to their elders.

      • What is more useful that a single product is multiple products that cooperate together. KO and OO do just that as they now use the file format. In this fashion, I can open a file in KO, work on it, then send it to you. Then you can open it in OO on your MS system (or mac, or BSD, or ...). No problem with the output and how it looks.

        With MS office, it does not exchange nicely with anybody else. Worse, it does not exchange nicely with past version.

    • I thought so, too. (Score:4, Informative)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:28PM (#12884866)
      Until i read (and verified) that just about nobody outside sun does anything for openoffice.
      Of the core group, only 4 are not sun employees, so there is nothing like e.g. the kernel or kde.
    • I ask this question about 99% of OSS products. This is no different. It's another case of a solution looking for a problem. That's a *guaranteed* formula for failure in the mass market. Sure, there will be hobbyists that use this stuff forever, but most people will just look at it and think to themselves, "Uh, what's the point?"

      • Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:41PM (#12884980) Homepage Journal
        You just described the starting point for just about every company, book, product and project ever created. Actually, everything that is created other than the initial invention.

        If somebody didn't look at it and say "I can make something slightly better", we'd be reading Slashdot on clay tablets.

        --
        Evan

      • I say the same thing about Linux, "Uh, what's the point?" I mean theres *BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OS X, hell, theres a real Unix for every platform so why do all these people waste their time on this linux thing. Its just a solution looking for a problem. 'That's a *guaranteed* formula for failure in the mass market. Sure, there will be hobbyists that use this stuff forever, but most people will just look at it and think to themselves, "Uh, what's the point?"'
      • Modern markets are filled with products that started out as solutions looking for problems. Successful marketing has a funny way of creating "problems." The issue here is that OSS, by its very nature, has little capacity for marketing beyond following current fads. BUt if the current anti-MS fad continues, OSS can do very well.

        -matthew

    • Re:What's the point? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:36PM (#12884940) Homepage Journal
      But OpenOffice is painful for me to use in an otherwise KDE-only desktop. For starters, it doesn't use KIO slaves, so I can't open files fish sftp:// [ftp] fish://, or webdav:// from remote hosts. That and a million other small things (like load time) make KWord much more pleasant for me in daily usage.

      I'm glad we have two strong, popular office suites that don't compete for resources -- that is, KDE folks probably have little interest in hacking OpenOffice and vice versa. Now that they'll be sharing a common file format, it'll be nice to be able to pick the right tool for a particular job and know that users can still view the results in their environment of choice.

      • You know, KIOslaves and gnome-vfs are both really bad ideas. There are great places for virtual filesystem code (kernel, userspace filesystems like fuse or lufs, or for wildly different interfaces, just simple stand-alone libraries), and libraries tied into desktop environments is not one (especially since lots of authors that might enjoy using this functionality aren't interested in tying their apps to KDE or GNOME).
        • so, it's really bad, that when I pop in an audio cd in KDE, that I can rip the cd simply by dragging the audio files to a folder in my home directory?

          Yeah. That sucks.

          You obviously haven't thought about this.
          • He's not talking about the idea being bad, he's talking about what level of the OS / Library / Application stack that the VFSs are implemented at. To put it another way, wouldn't it be awesome if you could not only drag the audio files from the cd to a folder in your home directory, but also perform the same action from the command line (using cp) or use GTK based app to edit the audio, etc.

        • Re:KIOslaves are a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @07:47PM (#12886128) Homepage Journal
          There are great places for virtual filesystem code

          ...until you bring in cross-platform compatibility as a requirement. I run KDE on FreeBSD, not Linux, so kernel layers are right out. By the time you go through all the work of making nice, portable virtual filesystem layers, I imagine you'll inevitably end up with something at least as complex as KIO slaves anyway.

    • Have you even USED OpenOffice on Linux? It is so bloated and slow with its proprietary widget set and all. An Office suite that is integrated with a Linux desktop is much needed.

      -matthew

      • Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        OOO now can use native widgets.
        Try the 1.9m* snapshots. Feels a LOT snappier.
        • This should be clarified: OOo does not "use" the native toolkit as an application that is natively written with that toolkit does. It is better described as OOo is using the toolkit to just draw the widgets on the screen.

        • Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Qwavel ( 733416 )

          I'm not sure what you are referring to, but OOo 2.0 does not use native widgets - it fakes them.

          There are a variety of ways to do native support - faking it is the worst in my opinion.

          Yet another reason why there is a need for office suites other than OOo.

          But please make KOffice available on Windows. You would multiply your potential user base hugely.
    • What market are you talking about? Both are free. It's that monoculture thing again.

      Monoculture bad, diversity good.

    • Yes there is a point (Score:4)

      by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @06:27PM (#12885692) Homepage Journal
      KO is smaller, faster and lighter weight then OO.

      For 90% of the users out there, its features are more then enough..
    • All of the momentum and best coders are behind OpenOffice. Does the market really need a KO?

      You could have made the same argument against KHTML. I think the KDE project has shown that there is plenty of room for slick, lightweight alternatives. Your post is really more of a troll than anything. How is it that KOffice adds two new apps and tons of features when "OpenOffice has all the momentum" ? And *best* coders ? Really, who are you to judge ? OpenOffice is the undoubtedly the bigger project. Does
    • I think so. One of the advantages of open source is to be able to go experiment by going in two different directions trying both and eventually settling on whichever one works better. Open Office is making the assumption that the number one criteria for an office suite is that it act like MSOffice and that it be able to interoperate with their file formats. KOffice is looking more to integrate the office functions into the entire desktop experience (like the way Apple integrates multimedia).
    • Yes - kOffice doesn't require Java.

  • Sarge (Score:2)

    by XanC ( 644172 )
    Dang it, too late for Sarge!

    I'm sure there will be .debs available on KDEs site soon though.

  • Expect More Interest (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EZR-2000 ( 266142 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:23PM (#12884830)
    Due to the OpenOffice.org Java backlash, expect to see a spike in interest in KOffice, especially considering that, being written in Qt, it should, at least theoretically, compile natively on Windows and (unlike OOo) Mac OS X. However, it's not as if the FLOSS community is hunky-dory about Qt; see the old Harmony project for more on that.

    • Re:Expect More Interest (Score:4, Informative)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:31PM (#12884897) Homepage Journal
      However, it's not as if the FLOSS community is hunky-dory about Qt; see the old Harmony project for more on that.

      That was before Qt was GPLed. It's now completely Free Software (with caps). When Qt 4.0 is released, rumor has it that the Windows version will be GPLed as well.

      --
      Evan

    • Due to the OpenOffice.org Java backlash, expect to see a spike in interest in KOffice

      I suspect you overestimate the amount of people who care more about RMS's ethics than getting the job done. The fact is, businesses everywhere are building their entire infrastructure on Java. I doubt any of them is going to stop using Ooo because it has some minor dependencies on Java. The Microsoft shops certainly couldn't care less about RMS's ethics. And I doubt even the majority of the rare 100% OSS shops care.

      I
    • The FLOSS community in general loves, and has always loved, Qt. The only holdouts are GNU, Debian and Redhat. No one else has any problems with it.

      It has been demonstrated time and time again that there will always be a miniscule but extremely shrill segment that hates Qt and will come up with any excuse to shit on it. For a while the excuse was that Trolltech didn't apologize to Richard Stallman (seriously!), then it was that it wasn't crossplatform enough (go figure). For a while it was that the Canopy G
      • I don't see much evidence that any of these guys are "holdouts".

        By GNU I assume you mean the FSF in which case QT is now a GPLed product. They are happy. Stallman has even indicated this. Debian long ago dropped any issues they had. RedHat is Gnome house but they are actively working to try and end any hard feelings that exist. At this point KOffice for example considers the RH-enterprise version to be the most debugged for a platform.

        It seems to be HP, IBM, Sun, CA, etc... that are against QT and no

  • mirror of video (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://qartis.com/krita.avi [qartis.com]

  • No Windows version? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:25PM (#12884840)
    Why no Windows version? Are they deliberately trying to be anti-competitive? How is this fair to Windows users? Are they trying to stifle Windows usage? Where's the DOJ when you need 'em?

    And yes, this was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.

  • The news has to get out sometime (Score:5, Interesting)

    by udderly ( 890305 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:26PM (#12884846)
    Sooner or later you would think that people are going to realize that the vast, vast majority of users can do without MS Office and its $400 price tag. I hope that it's sooner!
    • Sooner or later you would think that people are going to realize that the vast, vast majority of users can do without MS Office and its $400 price tag. I hope that it's sooner!

      Near as I can tell, KOffice doesn't run on Windows.
      • Actually, I'm reasonably sure that an ancient version of it does, though you probably need an X server. Maybe with Qt 4 being free on windows, as it appears it will be, KDE will pick up on windows. Or maybe not. It doesn't affect me all that much.
    • I'm really not so sure about that. there are a lot of MSOffice powerusers out there that do a lot with Excel (macros, multiple worksheets, ODBC connect...), Word (automated mail merges, automated document formatting, specialized add-ons like bibliography programs) and especially Access.

      That is something like 2% of the population. They support something like 20% of the population by giving them advanced features. The nice thing is this 2% will be easy to convert once we genuinely have a superior OSS offi
    • you would think that people are going to realize that the vast, vast majority of users can do without MS Office and its $400 price tag.

      Let us know when you find someone who has paid retail list for a legit copy of Office. Student-Teacher Edition can be found at $150 and under and installs on three PCs.

  • OpenDocument for Spreadsheets (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:26PM (#12884857)
    OpenDocument sounds great, but is the spreadsheet specification insufficient? Apparently Gnumeric will not be adding support for it[1]. Is KOffice supporting it for spreadsheets?

    I want to see an open format for documents, including spreadsheets, so I'm concerned that OpenDocument might not be sufficient.

    [1] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/mortenw/2005/06/16/0 [gnome.org]

    • Re:OpenDocument for Spreadsheets (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dominator ( 61418 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:54PM (#12885084) Homepage
      As Morten points out, their spreadsheet documentation is insufficient to build an implementation around.

      However, the Nokia Maemo team will be helping AbiWord and Gnumeric improve their ODT import/export support[1]. For what it's worth, when I've been working on the SXW/ODT import/export in AbiWord, I only sparingly use the official specification, as it's too large and cumbersome to be of great use. It's so much easier to create interesting test cases and map those back to AbiWord's semantics. I imagine that the Nokia guys will be doing something similar when they add better ODT support in Gnumeric.

      [1] http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/ 2005/Jun/0276.html [abisource.com]
    • Hmm, I wonder if those reasons could have played a part in MS not adopting the OpenDocument format. I mean if Gnumeric couldn't see it as a flexible enough format, what could MS Excel make of it with all of the extra features and legacy support it has to shoe in?

  • Krita... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:30PM (#12884884) Journal
    Krita is swedish for "chalk"... Maybe more languages too, I don't know.
    It's probably behind the name anyway.

    • Re:Krita... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:48PM (#12885038)
      At the maintainer of Krita I can say with confidence that you are right. That's where the name came from. I can't say I'm happy with it, though...

      But Krita has always had trouble with naming. KImageShop, the first name was obviously unsuitable. The next name, Krayon, was nuked by the well-known German law shark von Gravenreuth. Kandinsky (my favourite) was mooted, but Krita was chosen -- years before my involvement in Krita.

      But three names is enough, I'm not going for another rename!

      Boudewijn Rempt
    • And in Norwegian it's slang for "credit"... :-)

  • An interesting thing to watch (Score:5, Insightful)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:31PM (#12884888) Homepage
    HTML is supposed to be a "standard" but it's often forgivable when pages render differently from machine to machine and browser to browser. (Forgivable to an extent)

    But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation. I haven't looked at the specs for this document format (and I do not plan to unless I have a week or more of insomnia) so I don't know how detailed the description is. But now that OO.o and KOffice both support the format, it will be interesting to write something in one and open in the other. My hopes are that whatever I do in one will look identical in the other.

    (With OO.o being cross-platform and all, why would KOffice be used? I gave up on AbiWord in favor of OO.o for that very reason...)

    • Re:An interesting thing to watch (Score:5, Informative)

      by delire ( 809063 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:36PM (#12884943)
      (With OO.o being cross-platform and all, why would KOffice be used? I gave up on AbiWord in favor of OO.o for that very reason...)
      For what very reason? [abiword.org]
    • HTML is supposed to be a "standard" but it's often forgivable when pages render differently from machine to machine and browser to browser.

      Forgivable? Expected! No one should reasonably think that a page will render the same on IE at 640x480 as Konqueror at 1600x1200. The web is not print; it's a complete different media.

      But word processing documents are another matter entirely. People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to im

      • People who expect word processor documents to be to-the-pixel identical on different machines are on crack. What if the recipient of your document uses a different paper size than you (eg letter vs A4)?

        I call BS on this. On different papers, yes, the layouts would be different. And that's what a word processor is for, in general, rendering something onto paper. If a Linux and a Windows version of the same word processor (or format) were showing a document for printing on 8.5x11 paper, there's no reas
        • On different papers, yes, the layouts would be different.

          No, it won't. Any sane and sensible page layout program specifies the size of the print area, not the size of the margins. And, if your word processor allows you to set either, it's a pretty good indication that it's intended to be used as a page layout program, not as general purpose text editor.

          If other word processors are making the mistake of copying MS Word's broken behaviour on something this simple, I shudder to think what other stupid mis

    • Re:An interesting thing to watch (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:50PM (#12885057) Homepage Journal
      HTML is a standard - but it is not a rendering standard. HTML is supposed to look different on different browsers. In fact, quite a bit of how it is designed is based on the concept that different browsers will have different capabilities and will display the page differently. It is a markup language, which is why tags are named things like address, credit, and em (for emphasized). It does not define how a section is displayed as emphasized, just that it is supposed to be rendered with emphasis.

      Standards for layout, like Postscript, tend to do better at the things you want them to. But then, that's like saying a boat takes you across water better than a city bus.

      --
      Evan

    • People care about the size and position of any item on a page. It really needs to be very exact from implementation to implementation.

      (Ignoring your implication that there are differing levels of "exact")...

      Let me know when MS gets it right. In MS-Word, changing your *printer driver* can affect the layout of the page.

  • Kexi is awesome (Score:5, Informative)

    by bhsx ( 458600 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:39PM (#12884968)
    Kexi is a really exciting addition to KOffice. I've had my eye on it for a long time. The beta build process was a real bear; but I even got a few versions built. It was snappy and probably even easier to use than Access. You can search /. for a post from a couple years ago with me bitching about needing an Access replacement; with Kexi and Base (OO.o) we now have two! Awesome.
    • I agree I can't wait for OSX versions. I was going to create a database application open source and couldn't think of any reasonable way to do it. 4D doesn't have a free version anymore, openbase now requires a server, Access is windows only, FileMaker isn't powerful enough (also non free)....

  • Packages are available for Kubuntu as is a Live CD with KOffice 1.4 (and KDE 3.4.1).

    Kubuntu Hoary KOffice CD and packages [kubuntu.org].

  • more screenshots (Score:5, Informative)

    by Karma Sucks ( 127136 ) on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:46PM (#12885023)
    On OSDir.com. [osdir.com]

  • Gooey (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BandwidthHog ( 257320 ) <inactive.slashdo ... icallyenough.com> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @04:59PM (#12885117) Homepage Journal
    After seeing a screen shot or two, Krita suffers from one of the same problems as most other image editing apps: the interface elements are just too large and the open space around them too great. Most people using that type of software spend a lot of time with the interface, and tend to need a whole damn lot of interface on screen at all times; that begs for small, dense, highly visible widgets.

    I get the impression that none of the windowing toolkits offer such widgets. Seems that Adobe had to roll their own for Windows and the old Mac OS (just checked Apple's dev tools: there are regular, small and mini sizes available for many things, if not all).

    I think just having that look (and the increased efficiency of screen real estate it brings) would go a long way toward legitimizing open source graphics apps among their target audience.
  • So has anyone figured out if the new MS format will be license-compatible with the GPL or BSD or some OSS license?

    It'd be great if OSS software had built-in support for the MS format before Office 12 was out. Sure MS, could break the format right before the release, but I bet they'd be reluctant as other companies would complain.

  • Yay, but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tacocat ( 527354 ) <tallison1 AT twmi DOT rr DOT com> on Wednesday June 22, 2005 @08:36PM (#12886343)

    I applaud the work accomplished with KDE.

    but....

    At this point in time I think that the capability of OpenOffice is a long ways beyond these guys.. Initially I would say, "why bother", but then that's not the Open Source way. There needs to be competition for every software application even if someone like me judges one to be far superior to the competition.

    So I applaud the work accomplished.

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