KOffice 1.6 Released 186
ingwa writes "The KOffice team today released version 1.6 of its office suite. Among other things, this release contains an improved Krita which can now handle color spaces like CMYK. This makes it the only free image editor that can be used in professional pre-press work. Together with the other improvements, this release probably makes it the best free image editor in the world. The release also contains improvements in Kexi, the MS Access like database application, and a new scripting framework which makes it extremely simple to script applications that handle OpenDocument data. With this release KOffice also surpasses OpenOffice.org in some ways, e.g. it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML test suite while Openoffice.org only handles 22%. See the KOffice homepage for more information."
Kudos to the dev team (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What the hell is this crap? (Score:5, Informative)
"For the future it is planned to base GIMP on a more generic graphical library called GEGL, thereby addressing some fundamental design limitations that prevent many enhancements such as native CMYK support. However, implementation of this plan has been continually put off since 2000."
An eternity, eh? Apparently CYMK hasn't been in there long enough to get inclusion in the Wikipedia article. Also, are you sure you aren't just using the plugin? http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml [blackfiveservices.co.uk]
Re:What the hell is this crap? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Gnome version? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:KOffice for OSX, Win32? (Score:2, Informative)
Hence things fire in a split second.
So for very quick jobs it can be neat.
OpenOffice takes ages to fire-up add Firefox to the list too.
Now for all you lovers of proprietory and closed-source software,
these guys used to code a neat fast loading Word/Excel alternative:
http://www.softmaker.com/ [softmaker.com]
Printing in KDE (Score:1, Informative)
In KDE, any application can print to PDF, Postscript, and fax. That has been the case for years...
You can even print to PDF and attach the PDF to an email message in one smooth move.
Re:Kerning (Score:3, Informative)
From what I understand, this is at least in part a Qt 3.x issue, and will be fixed in Koffice 2.0 with the port to Qt 4.x. The big showstopper for me, and most people, is the lack of Microsoft Word support. See http://koffice.kde.org/filters/1.6/ [kde.org].
Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp (Score:5, Informative)
Abiword doesn't really export to doc either, they just save as rtf and give it a .doc extension (see here [abisource.com]. KWord can easily save to rtf, and even lists it as "RTF Document (Microsoft Word Compatible)" in the save-as dialog. Maybe you can request that the developers add an option to automatically save as rtf with a doc extension, just like Abiword, although I don't personally consider having to change a document extension manually a "dealbreaker."
Re:Kerning (Score:5, Informative)
CMYK was your mistake (Score:3, Informative)
1. only 8-bit channels
2. most code is ignorant of gamma
CMYK as an editing format is normally very wrong. If you use spot colors, then maybe WITH DEVICE PROFILES it is reasonable to do some work using the color channels individually. Don't ever get the idea of painting in CMYK, which is as defective as saving your temporary work files in highly-compressed JPEG.
The other thing you need for prepress work is a proper RGB-to-CMYK output conversion. This is specific to your press, ink, paper, and other conditions. You should expect your vendors to provide you with a decent conversion. For an excellent conversion, you will need to measure the expected press/ink/paper setup yourself.
Note: if you worked in CMYK, you'd need a CMYK-to-CMYK conversion! Your press output will vary based on the ink and paper you use. It may vary with other factors, such as the humidity at which you stored the paper. So don't imagine that CMYK would let you get away without conversion. It just makes things worse.
It's really the 8-bit channels and gamma fuckups that make the GIMP unacceptable, but you made things much worse by falling for the CMYK myth.
Re:Marketer alert? (Score:2, Informative)
There are so many great open source projects that nobody is using just because nobody knows about it. I'm not going to let that happen to KOffice.
Re:Kudos to the dev team (Score:5, Informative)
and, last time I used it, very fast compared to the competition. That counts for a lot in my book. "It's the latency, stupid!"
Packages already avaliable for Kubuntu (Score:3, Informative)
or, add these to you
* deb ftp://bolugftp.uni-bonn.de/pub/kde/stable/koffice
* deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.kde.org/pu
* deb http://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/kde/stable/kof
* deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/koffice-16 [kubuntu.org] dapper main
Re:For people who complain about GIMP (Score:3, Informative)
It's also available for the Mac and Windoze. The professional version, which I use, includes all three. Additionally, since I've bought it I can't count how many free upgrades I've downloaded with useful new features. They also seem fairly responsive to their users needs.
I haven't spent much time with Krita, but it also handles raw files and has 16-bit per color support (48 bit RGB) and multiple color spaces.
As for printing, I've heard there's new printer support coming out (if not already out) that looks better on Linux than Windows, at least with Epson printers (I don't know about other brands).
-Aaron