KOffice 1.5 Released 296
ingwa writes to tell us that the KOffice team has released version 1.5 which offers, among other things, default OpenDocument file format, new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. From the announcement: "KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument."
Mixed Bag (Score:4, Interesting)
Congrats... (Score:3, Interesting)
ODF has pushed a long way since I first heard about it, but without support from the industry, their will be no pressure against Microsoft to implement it into MSOffice.
Hopefully Google and Writely will tip the edge toward ODF.
Re:Congrats... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ko or ooo? (Score:5, Interesting)
But it still can't print! (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this sounds like a troll but I don't mean it that way. I'd switch from OpenOffice to KOffice in a heartbeat if I could, but I just can't do it right now. Please, please! make printing work right and I'll be eternally grateful.
Re:I still don't get it...... (Score:5, Interesting)
Go ahead and explain to this dumbass why I want to give up a program that fits in with the rest of my desktop, supports KIOslaves, and is document-compatible with your office suite of choice. Really, I'm waiting...
The reason for their coexistence is that they have two different design philosophies, two different styles of programming, are built on two completely different frameworks, and appeal to two different groups of people (KDE users versus everyone else). How would you expect them to reconcile those differences? Do you also want KHTML to merge with Gecko? After all, they both do the same thing.
Large documents (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But it still can't print! (Score:5, Interesting)
My PDF output [honeypot.net] looks nothing at all like my KWord screen [honeypot.net]. To make those images, I imported a Word doc that our transcriptionist emailed to us, then printed to PDF. I took a screenshot of KWord and KPDF using The Gimp, and cropped each shot to show a representative snippet of text.
Unfortunately, the PDF looks much more like my printed output that I'd like. I have no idea why my printing looks so awful (only through KWord; oowriter2 looks fine), but that's a pretty accurate example of how bad it is.
Other than the fact that I can't print from it, I love KWord. Of course, that's like asking Mrs. Lincoln how she liked the play.
Why I'm using KOffice (Score:4, Interesting)
I had previously shied away from KOffice/Kword because although the earlier versions offered the ability to save/print to pdf file, the pdf file it created sometimes wasn't compatible with Acroread or Windows or even OO.org. So when creating docs with earlier versions of KWord, just to be sure, I'd save the file as ps, then open a shell and use ps2pdf to convert, and everything worked ok. In order to avoid that, as OO.org hit 1.1.x then 1.2.x then 1.3.x, I started using OO.org more and more, especially because its export to pdf button worked flawlessly every time. Still does. But events have conspired to bring me back into the KOffice fold.
OO.org is just too resource intensive. When I need to create a short document, if kword/kate or vim aren't good enough for lack of features, I found myself trying to think of alternatives rather than fire up OO.org and watch it eat up memory and slow everything down. So I apt-get installed KOffice again after purging it, and installed all the KOffice related recommends/suggests, and found that it had advanced enough to the point of my liking it. That's a change because just a few versions back I was really disappointed in the pdf problem, the limited number of other file formats it was capable of saving to with those formats being compatible with the same formats on other applications, etc.
Now, the number one reason I'm using KOffice almost exclusively is because I can't print from OO.org, Mozilla/Firefox, or some other applications. I have an HP4+ printer plugged via parallel port into a knoppix desktop running from the CD drive. It's running cupsd, and I'm printing either directly from the knoppix desktop, or printing from other desktops logged into the file server via ssh, using the identities on the file server. Previously, I had an Epson ink jet printer plugged into the knoppix via cupsd, but changed the printer to the HP a while back. Changed the configurations in cupsd and cups in
I went to the OO.org site and followed the how-to for setting up a printer, but I still couldn't get it to work. It was a while ago, but I think I also went to the Firefox site to look for help, and went through the Mozilla/Firefox help menus to try and find help, but I still can't print from OO.org, Firefox, and now that I think about it, Acroread and possibly xpdf as well.
So I think I'm missing an entry in another config file where OO.org and Firefox and Xpdf and other non-kde apps look for info on what printers are available. Luckily, kde apps are using some other method to list available printers, so if I need to create something in OO.org, I reopen it in Kword or create a pdf and print it through kword or kpdf. If I have a web page opened in Firefox or Mozilla that I need to print, I have to re-open the page in Konqueror before I can print it.
As long as my situation lasts, I'm hoping that KOffice gets better and better before Etch hits stable, and continues to get better after that. I'm semi-hooked and getting in deeper as time passes.
Re:I still don't get it...... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, that's coincidental. Look at audacity for something happy to use an existing library and very crossplatform. And look at say xine for something that implements its own widgets and is still linux-only.
Re:Krita (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenOffice Writer Import: The filter generally works well, however some features might be missing or might not work correctly yet.
OpenOffice Writer Export: The filter generally works although it is not finished, and it may suffer from some instability.
This certianly raises some questions.
Re:Kcrappy Knaming Kscheme (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux vs Windows naming (Score:4, Interesting)
To me the K is fine, but some of the Linux application names are just dumb. Take Pico, GIMP, and GAIM. Who would of thought that they are a text editor, image editor, and IM apps, respectively?
You're right. Applications should have clear and consise names that reflect what they do, like Microsoft Excel...
Certainly not me, and according to usability studies not by many other users either.
The GIMP's name affects its usability? I assumed the less-than-stellar UI was what causes issues, not some silly name. I guess that's why the iPod was so unsuccessful too, since you can't tell it's a music player from its name.
Linux wouldn't be where it is today without its user interface, and that is of course, how Windows became so popular.
The one "borrowed" from Apple/Xerox?
For the Linux users that say, well its an "expert" interface
By "Linux" I assume you mean KDE, or Gnome, or XFCE, or TWM, or any number of window managers or desktop environments that run atop the kernel. Of course, you can choose whichever interface is most appropriate to your tastes/tasks: KDE gives you immense customization ala Windows, GNOME strives to keep things simpler, etc.
Linux will only become more dominate with a better UI
I fail to see how KDE or GNOME will ultimately fail in this respect, with my preference going to the former. But YMMV.
Re:Large documents (Score:2, Interesting)
I was at a seminar by an APS (American Physical Society) editing committee guy once, and he said that certain typesets render better on their mass printing systems than others (we are talking a worldwide distribution numbering in the hundreds of thousands), so they have been known to reject latex submissions with unnecessarily long or redundant typesettings (like people who use lots of $$ $$ instead of eqnarray{} and so on). He did not provide details.
Don't look at me. He said so. Usually, they try to make the changes themselves. However, for very long papers (review articles etc) they don't bother, they just send 'em back until the author(s) fix them.
I wrote my first paper in Lyx, converted it to Latex and submitted it to elsevier science in 1999. The rendering into dvi and postscript was fine . They sent it back, saying that the latex 'formatting' was poor and I had to do it 'better'. I took it to my research group secretary and he said the latex has to be much cleaner (I was only an undergrad back then and was new to latex). He re-edited the typesets and made it render the same content in the same way only the source was much cleaner and more organized (properly tabulated figures according to global templates, instead of what Lyx does, which is just \includegraphics followed by lots of \hspace* \vspace* for indentation).
Of course, bear in mind that this was way back in 1999. I haven't used Lyx since, preferring to stick to original latex. I dunno if the latex export thingie in Lyx has improved or not. It's not a big deal for me anymore since I have a lot of predefined stuff in latex for my papers and just recycle those.
Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
There are various little things that KWord does support that OOo does not (yet) support. The ODF standard was created by both office suits and KOffice people did request features like Frames and some numbering-types , as a fast example, that made it into the spec but that OOo still does not support. I'm sure there is more.
Re:Why I'm using KOffice (Score:1, Interesting)
Thanks to your hint, I now have a networked printer. Now if I could just figure out how to remove the HP from the parallel port and get it to work through its ethernet card...
another day, another day to play with Debian. Thanks to you though, today is a happy, happy day compared to the frustrating days I've had trying to get printing to work, and then on shuffling files between OOo or Acroread or Firefox, to Konqueror or other KDE apps just to get them to print. Not fun, especially when in a hurry.
Thanks again!