KDE Releases Calligra 2.7 30
jrepin writes "The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.7 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra active and the Calligra Office Engine. Words, the word processing application, has a new look for the toolbox. In the same toolbox there are also new controls to manipulate shapes with much enhanced usability. Author, the writer's application, has new support for EPUB3: mathematical formulas and multimedia contents are now exported to ebooks using the EPUB format. There is also new support for book covers using images. Plan, the project management application, has improvement in the scheduling of tasks. The formula shape now has new ways to enter formula: a matlab/octave mode and a LaTEX mode."
calligra? (Score:1, Funny)
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I just checked in my KDE menu and it is indeed called Calligra. Note that I use LibreOffice although...
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Whoosh Whoosh? ;-)
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Where did this come from? (Score:3)
I've been aware of Planner for some time - but Braindump, Flow? These I've never heard of but they look great!
Anyone worked with Calligra? Compare Braindump to Freemind? Flow to Omnigraffle?
Re:Where did this come from? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using KDE since it was released, and have never given Calliga a peek, and only about 6 months ago have I even heard of Calliga at all.
You'd never know it by visiting the Calligra site, but it was forked from KOffice, and Kword, KSpread, KPresenter etc. all got
renamed after the Fork. (I had guessed it was a fork because large application suites don't spring fully fledged from nothing).
A primer for those new to Caligra is Here [wikipedia.org].
I'm not sure I need yet another office suite at work, but it has some things that might be interesting
to try, since installation is just a click away on any competent Linux Distro.
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Thanks for the info - I think I'll give Braindump a go in the next few weeks (when they update their Ubuntu repo's)
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I think the Calliga name is quite new (and I assume Words is Kword 2).
I'm hoping for a usable cross platform Kexi personally.
Re:Where did this come from? (Score:4, Informative)
I think the Calliga name is quite new...
The first Calliga release was a little over a year ago, although the Calliga fork occurred about 2.5 years ago. It was a mass-exodus fork where nearly all the developers and maintainers went to the new project.
(and I assume Words is Kword 2).
Nope, Calliga Words was written from scratch over the last few years. Kword is the only KOffice application that did not become a Calliga application.
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Interesting, because the screen shots I glanced at really reminded me of it. I guess that just means KDE does really provide a framework for consistent application look and feel.
Well I only have 2.5 on my machine, waiting for OpenSuse to push 2.7, and most of Calliga looks decidedly bland, like they have done the bare minimum to get it working.
My version has move all the controls from the top to the side, which works great for documents, not so great for spread sheets, but they spent so little time doing this that the sidebar controls are obtuse. No hover help.
On the upside, it opens everything I've thrown at it, although selecting all text in a document and changing font family m
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It came from Koffice.
Caligula? (Score:2, Funny)
Caligula? Why would I want to use something named after a sado-masochistic Roman emperor?
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If you ever tried to import a document from your kid's Mac into it, you'd understand completely.
Calligra Words (Score:5, Informative)
is the only part of the Calligra Suite I have really tried out (version 2.6.4). It lacks some features necessary for me, but it is a nice lightweight word processor. Its best feature is its tabbed & indexed sidebar. Just moving icon toolbars to the side doesn't work. It seems so logical to use some of that wide screen real estate for toolbars, but in reality it is hard to make sidebars work.
But Calligra Word has got it right:
Text instead of icons.
Tabbed & indexed to maximize the information, but without losing spatial memory of where functions are. (The main thing I hate about Microsofts "Ribbon").
The Calligra Word "Dockers" is also a very nice concept: they are basically information and toolbar tiles that defaults to the right side. They can either be compressed when tiled together, be tabbed behind each other, or float freely
Looking at the screenshoot of the new 2.7 version, they seem to have improved the toolboxes and their layout even further
Another thing Calligra does very well, is integration with the other components. The Calligra Word has superb drawing and figure making and manipulation abilities, while feeling really fast and lightweight at the same time, no long waits or disc trashing while the drawing component is started etc.
It really shines when it comes to making fast one-off DTP/presentation stuff like combining text, figures and pictures, and connecting them with lines.
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Those who do not know history, are doomed to repeat it.
Everybody nowadays tries to imitate the InfoBox, known from Lotus WordPro [wikimedia.org], but nobody quite achieves it.
The key points everybody gets wrong:
- It wasn't like a dialog box to set something. It was a editable *state* display. That means undo was unnecessary. Really. If you clicked something, just click it again. Or pick the old checkbox again.
- It allowed you to pick and edit *all* levels of document hierarchy that the cursor currently was in. Paragraph in
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Ok, we're getting off you lawn now Pops, calm down, maybe sit a spell...
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Icons that are a good representation of their function and toolbar customization together provide the same easily-recognized features as a sidebar in a much smaller space. If users are having trouble to the point of needing labels after a few uses, that suggests that the icon designers focused too heavily on being attractive or trendy rather than clearly representing their function. It's a sadly common problem in modern-day software, regardless of its economic or source status -- a shame, since there's no
Update to windows port? (Score:2)
This would be nice, and have all the modules, not just some.
Calligra web site is uninformative (Score:2)
The Calligra web site is incredibly bad—there is almost no information about any of the programs, just a few superficial paragraphs. Just awful, an embarrassment to the development team, I'm sure.
This is an example of the "airport signs" problem: The people who build the airport already know how to get around the airport and so the signs that they put up are not helpful to those who rarely visit the airport.
On another crappy note, the link to the OS X installer just goes 404.
Oh well.