The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KOffice 1.4 for Linux and Unix operating systems. The KOffice 1.4 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
and Kexi – An integrated data management application.
KOffice 1.4 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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kreat!
Why would I chose koffice over OOo?
It’s lighter and has great KDE integration.
yes, finally a fast and good-enough way to open excel sheets 🙂 (openoffice is better, but slower)
i like the oasis document format (compatible with openoffice) and the better spell check, too.
gotta download it 🙂
Better integration into KDE.
Faster because it uses less resources.
Because you hate Sun and everything related to them…
I’m sure there are even more reasons that I can’t think of right now.
even further off then OO.o
PS: version 2.o of OO.o is looking a lot better in terms of compatibility.
Both OpenOffice and Koffice are doing a great service to open source. The former by bringing windows users to Linux
I would love to try Koffice 1.4 with Suse 9.3.
Has anyone packaged Koffice 1.4 for Suse 9.3?
Thanks
Development is a bit more agile than OO.o, so it’s more fun to watch.
Cleaner code base.
And of course, smaller, faster, better KDE integration, etc. like others have said. Good for typing up your own documents. Bad for interacting with MS Office users. Usually not as good if you need very specific features.
The KOffice Project – Krita
http://www.koffice.org/krita/
From the features, looks more than painter.
Does it do something like GIMP?
If open source can coordinate, that’s win-win situation.
Well, Krita is a paint application, not a retouche app like the GIMP. It also handles CMYK (still somewhat buggy) and should have HDR-support soon, IIRC.
Couldn’t help wondering if your real name is gasimir … =)
Kword has desktop publishing features which writer doesn’t
All I have to say is that I am really excited about this release. KWord is great for the quick document, although I will still use LaTeX for longer ones I care about
. I can’t wait to try Krita KDE has been in need of this type of app for too long. KOffice is a great project and provides a great alternative to the heavier OO.org much as KHTML provides a great alternative to Gecko. The more great free software choices the better 
. I don’t understand all of the whats the point comments about KOffice, after all would anyone advocate that developers stop working on OO.org just because you can wait a little longer and boot into Word.
Since when has the GIMP been a ‘retouching app’? Last time I checked it was a general purpose image manipulation program, and has traditionally been the best choice for image editing, painting, procedural generation and manipulation of images as well as photo retouching and others in the Linux/UNIX space.
Personally, I think a little competition from Krita (which looks pretty good from the screenshots) might force the GIMP developers to pull their heads out of the sand re user interface and support for higher bit-depth imagery.
After Qt for win32 goes open source, will all this K*** stuff become available (easily portable) for windows?
Yes, it will likely get ported to windows.
For the impatient, there is a way to run KDE on Cygwin. A friend of mine tried it and it works. I didn’t bother since I mostly run Linux but if you want to try:
http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
a^k
I find some of the K programs smaller, slicker and more elegant than its bigger open source brothers.
It would be interesting to polish them and release a package for MakOS X.
But they have to be aquaified, using system fonts, apple menus, printing etc and none of that X-Windows that we Mac users don’t understand.
NeoOffice/J has done it with OpenOffice. It has been done with AbiWord.
Why not K?
When the people talk about krita being a pixel app, what do they mean exactly? A dpaint like app?
I have been looking for something dpaint like for ages, the only solution I’ve found so far is to run dpaint under uae
(Dpaint is an old and venerable pixel art app)
NeoOffice/J has done it with OpenOffice. It has been done with AbiWord.
AbiWord uses native widgets on all platforms it runs on. Therefore it’s easier because all the infrastructure for using different widget sets is in place.
Also Nokia will provide ODT support for AbiWord and Gnumeric. That’s one of the K guys main arguments against GNOME Office for a long time.
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/2005/Jun/0276.htm…
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnumeric-list/2005-June/msg00130.htm…
> Since when has the GIMP been a ‘retouching app’?
From the very beginning. If you care visiting http://www.gimp.org, you might be surprised to read “The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.”
First of all, it was a good argument for SUN to make StarOffice OpenSource. SUN had two choices: Sell a few licenses of Staroffice to people willing to buy and loose market share once koffice gets good enough for most people, or open it up and recieve the benefits of being able to create a de-facto standard (which now is not only de facto but also fully approved).
So the mere existance of an even inferior product can make most of the commercial product vendors try a different approach.
Second, it is great to have an additional light weight office suite.
What is meant is that the image is made up of pixels, not that the app is particular suited for manipulating data on the pixel level. So Krita is a >>pixel app<< the same way that GIMP or Photoshop are.
> Has anyone packaged Koffice 1.4 for Suse 9.3?
Yes, it’s being uploaded to http://ftp.kde.org and mirrors at the moment.
I’ve always really Koffice and whilst I’ve ditched Linux altogether now (way too much hassle) – I still hope that one day Koffice will see it’s way onto windows and OSX.
Koffice, is clean, easy to use, feature rich (for most real word operations IME), and fun – I can’t describe how an application can be fun, but Kword especially is.
I much prefer Kword, to Abiword, Word or Ooo.. the latter just annoying me so much I often prefer to use word!!!
of course, i still long for “display tags” that i had with Wordperfect, but that’s another thread entirely.
I’ll use it if it has a format painter. Does it?
I see that lots of people here are only wating for Windows port. It is sad that Linux is becoming not real desktop OS but devs-only environment where application are being created and grown before best of them get ported to ‘real’ system.
re anonymous: porting
AS much as I’m sure that was a troll. I actually agree with you. KDE has a lot going for, Koffice more so (IMHO). But Linux – for my needs at least, is a waste of time and resources. I neither want nor should be expected to learn yet another computing paradigm to be able to use and OS easily. I personally doubt linux will ever make it to the desktop proper – there’s too much wrong with it. That said, there are some great developments and excellent applications on it. Koffice, Kde, Gnome, Quanta+, to name but a few.
You think it is troll? Well, see comments under any news about Linux application. ‘Will it run under Windows?’ is really popular question.
>”nor should be expected to learn yet another computing paradigm to be able to use and OS easilynor should be expected to learn yet another computing paradigm to be able to use and OS easily”.
You are not using OS. You are using half-OS with proprietary lower layers.
>”there’s too much wrong with it” – yeah, and worst thing is that it is not gratis Windows.
it shows that the linux apps are oneupping the windows apps.
thats a good sign.
an OS is only as good as the applications it can run.
But Linux – for my needs at least, is a waste of time and resources.
I hear this a lot. Now, it may be a waste for you – as someone who doesn’t use UNIX-like systems (I presume) – but for the rest of us it’s not. There’s a reason why UNIX has been around for so long, it’s extremely powerful and flexible when used right. If we were all to abandon GNU, Linux and BSD then we would also loose the systems we call our own, that would be a waste. As much as Windows advocates love to bash our open systems – they are forgetting one thing – these systems belong to you too, even to Microsoft and it’s employees. Don’t you see? They’re our implementations and they belong to everyone. To contributors of Free Software and Open Source it’s all about giving everyone else your own, personal solution to a problem (Note: this is how I personally see it). For zealots that sometimes mean creating an alternative to Windows and whatnot. For the techie it means collaboration and an efficient development model to solve complex problems. And then there’s my personal favorite – a legacy of knowledge. Free Software offers an open implementation that I can learn from and study. Sure, I know how to use Windows but to tell you the truth I really know nothing about it’s underlying implementation (nor will I ever be allowed to know). That’s why I left Windows almost a decade ago. I had nothing more to learn from it other than pointing and clicking something when a new feature came about. And so, I got bored. Think about it, what if you are you are a application programmer and want to learn more about the internals of a modern kernel? Or maybe you wan’t to know about supercomputers and SMP? How exactly would you do that? Microsoft won’t teach you anything about it, that’s for sure. Without access to the hardware – the only answer is source code and documentation. That’s what Linux and BSD represents to me (well, my interests aren’t in kernels specifically, but you get the point) and it’s not a waste.
I admit I still use Windows, occasionally, but here’s the thing: To me, Windows is nothing more than a game (I like Diablo II) and a Word processor (I sometimes need Microsoft Word when I turn in reports and assignments, I hope this will change though as KOffice and OOo improves).
I neither want nor should be expected to learn yet another computing paradigm to be able to use and OS easily.
If you *want* to use it, then yes, you ARE expected to learn it. If you feel Linux should abandon it’s design principles because it’s different from Windows then by your reasoning MacOS X should abandon Darwin and become a Windows clone. It’s unreasonable to expect the average user to compile his own kernel, bootstrap compilers and make packages of his own but when it comes to the desktop (Which falls into the category of common computer usage), yes, we are within our full rights to expect you to learn. And why wouldn’t we be? You learned how to use Windows right? So why is it so hard to meet the open source desktops half-way like you did Windows i wonder. You have to learn because you forfitted the right to demand otherwise (e.g. asking for clones) when you learned Windows. Fair is fair right?
I personally doubt Linux will ever make it to the desktop proper – there’s too much wrong with it. That said, there are some great developments and excellent applications on it. Koffice, Kde, Gnome, Quanta+, to name but a few.
I hear this a lot too. There’s nothing wrong with the open source desktop (And by that I mean it’s functional enough, not perfect) and for advanced users it’s already there, it’s just not mainstream. As a seasoned GNU, Linux and BSD user I can tell you that the feature-set that exists in the UNIX realm is far beyond what any Windows system has been capable of, ever. Should I give that up because Windows is mainstream? .. because it’s popular?
I think not, it just wouldn’t be right.
> “it shows that the linux apps are oneupping the windows apps. ”
No, because after porting they are as much Windows apps as Linux apps. So they stop being Linux strong point.
>”an OS is only as good as the applications it can run. ”
And all that porting leads to situation when you have run some apps on Linux and all apps on Windows. Not a good sign.
Just as KOffice reaches maturity, it is dropped from Fedora’s install disks. I won’t be able to download it over dial-up.
What we need is cross platform KDE and KOffice.
I mean, unless you can really drag the windows users over… OOo will still be the free suite on Windows.
snakecharm – I get your point, and didn’t mean to offend you or any other Linux Lover/advocate.
For me though, I’ve wasted far far too much time trying to get things working in linux, let alone getting things done.
and as far as learning another os paradigm is concerned. AS a CS graduate and computer industry empoloyee and journalist I’ve always thought that the computer should do the hard work, so I don’t have to.
Every OS should be intuative and easy to understand and use whilst providing the maximum flexibility for learning styles and mental models – of course this is an ideal and VERY hard to achieve (but a philosophy Apple have based their success on trying to achieve!) – I don’t need to know how the OS works, or how to compile a kernel, hell I don’t even need to know what a kernel is – I just want a computer that lets me work easily and quickly.
For me, Linux as an OS doesn’t do this – KOffice however, it has to be said, does. Simple, straightforwards, understandable (works like any other office suite and where it doesn’t, it’s easy to figure out how to use it!)