KOffice 1.6 Released

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."

Openoffice draining KOffice (Hurd effect)

[Gopal.V]

Eventhough I still use OO.org 2.0, I've always felt that the codebase has the feel of having been through too many hands, have had too many cooks mix in all their special sauce (*cough* Sun... *cough* Java...), for it to leave a good after taste. But people still work on it and use it because it has the best MS Word .doc compatibility versus esoteric features like MathML (@see LaTeX) - it is a chicken and egg problem of getting your users/developers and having work done to get them (@see Hurd).

So, if there were on OO.org, I'd have estimated that Koffice would be much farther up in .doc compatibility than it is now. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.

Re:Marketer alert?

[RobotRunAmok]

Does anyone smell a marketing rat trying to push new software?

Push it... to what end? To make more money? It's all free! And my experience is that the free software guys don't have Marketing Rats, or at least none worthy of the name, else the products wouldn't have names like "The GIMP."

For people who complain about GIMP

[frup]

Well maybe now all those people who go "OOOH gimps not like photoshop" or "Linux image editors suck" can be silenced?

Re:Marketer alert?

[KingJackaL]

At least they're competing on open standards. Sort of like Opera's race to get support for SVG-(tiny/full) into their browser ahead of Gecko etc. No embrace and extend bollocks ;).

I'm also pretty pleased to see another FOSS image editor doing well, competition does great things for the market, even when the market is free :). I'll definately be giving Krita a go soon.

Re:Gnome version?

[FishWithAHammer]

Install KDE libraries.

Shazam.

Re:Yes: I, a KDE fan, can't use KWord: no Word imp

[vga_init]

It doesn't suprise me that they sidesteped MS Office support. Can you even imagine why it's important at all to support those proprietary formats?

I know interoperability is a key feature, but that's what we have OpenOffice for; KOffice is just trying to be the best office suite that it can be all by itself. It's that kind of focus that gives the project much of its promise. The article mentions that the suite surpasses OO.org and GIMP in many key features. I don't think that's a coincidence.

Also, now that the open document format is becoming more standard (and MS is begrudgingly obeying that standard), KOffice has more room to grow than it did before.

In my opinion, a good word processor/office suite acts as a tool for creation first. It just happens to double as a document viewer and exporter later, but that should not be the primary function.

Camera and scanner are not CMYK

[tepples]

Native CMYK from start to finish means you don't have to do the inevitable tweaks to the document when converting between colorspaces.

Your prosumer camera and scanner are not CMYK, which negates "from start" in a lot of cases. In addition, your computer monitor is not CMYK. Any intermediate view sent to a computer monitor will not be CMYK; it'll be a conversion, and conversions tend to be fallible.

Re:Gnome version?

[misleb]

Don't underestimate the value of having applications integrated each other and the desktop. While you can just install the KDE libs if you must run KOffice, it certainly isn't an ideal arrangement.

-matthew

Re:Gnome version?

[cybereal]

The only reason an open source project might do that is if they wanted better MS Windows support because historically QT hasn't been as available on windows as gtk. With qt4 I think this is going to change however.

Actually historically speaking Qt has been better supported on Windows than GTK and still is. There are actually two hinderances here: 1) In the past there has been no GPL license for the windows version of Qt (or Mac) but that has changed. Mac has a GPL version and Windows either has one or is getting it in the next major release. But, the more important limitation (anyone could've built binaries with a paid license to Qt...) is that KDE apps require KDE libs which are built on top of Qt and make many assumptions about the underlying OS being a unix-like OS. Sure you could use cygwin to get around this I imagine, and there ARE some prior examples of KDE running on Windows but it always worked terribly.

However, with the licensing question gone for Windows, it is much more likely that KOffice and the required KDE libraries to compile and run it could get a Windows port.

I wish this would happen. I would much rather use KOffice than blOatpenOffice.org.

Re:Openoffice draining KOffice (Hurd effect)

[vurian]

Well, actually, OpenOffice is mostly written in a primordial dialect of C++, comes with its own widget set (that can render using gtk or Qt) and a lot more. GTK nor Qt existed when the StarOffice people started writing their software.

Re:CYMK done wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is that the vast majority of professional work is RGB because the vast majority of professional colour work originates in colour photography. Put simply: colour accuracy only counts in product shots or logos of one kind or another. Logos will be defined in spot-colour terms which have no bearing on CYMK or RGB, and products shots will come from either scans or digital photography, either of which will be RGB. RGB is good enough.

CYMK is not important to professional printers except insofar that it is what they are used to, but no professional printer would even think about demanding CYMK artwork nowadays, if they ever did.

The GIMP is only useless to the sort of "professional" who has never spent any time with real printers in a real printshop. The rest of us have no difficulties preparing stuff for press using GIMP and a colour profile.

Sorry if that bursts your bubble.