KOffice 1.6 Alpha1 Announcement

DATELINE AUGUST 1, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KDE Ships Alpha Release of Major Enhancements to Free Integrated Office Suite

August 1, 2006 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KOffice 1.6-alpha1, the first preview release for KOffice 1.6, scheduled for release this October.

KOffice is an integrated office suite for KDE which utilizes free and open standards for its document formats, component communication and component embedding. This release is principally a public testing and developer solicitation release, and is definitively not intented for anything but testing. Help is welcome!

The goal of this release is to get feedback for the feature already available, whether it is bug, enhencement or new idea, we will need that to make sure the 1.6 release reach a high quality level and matches the need of our users.

This release includes:

• a frame-based, full-featured word processor (KWord);
• a spreadsheet application (KSpread);
• a presentation application (KPresenter);
• a flowchart application (Kivio);
• an integrated database application (Kexi);
• a new project management application (KPlato).
• a pixel based image editing and paint application (Krita);
• a vector-drawing application (Karbon14).

Additionally, KOffice includes robust embeddable objects:

• business quality reporting software (Kugar)
• full-featured charting engine (KChart)
• mathematical formula handling (KFormula)

as well as a built-in thesaurus (KThesaurus) and support for many different file formats.

KOffice and all its components (including KDE) are available for free under Open Source licenses from the KDE http and ftp mirrors.

Highlights

The main energy of the KOffice developement team is currently focused on the revolutionary 2.0 version that will be based on KDE 4 and Qt 4. The 1.6 release is intended mainly as a feature release for the two fastest developed components: Krita and Kexi. However, other components are being developed too. Here are the highligts of this preview of KOffice 1.6:

Lots of new features in Krita and Kexi

For more details look in the Principal Improvements below, or the complete changelog.

OpenDocument support in KFormula

The formula editor of KOffice now supports OpenDocument and uses it as its default file format.

Scripting support in KSpread

KSpread, the spreadsheet program, now supports scripting in python and Ruby just like Krita and Kexi.

Principal Improvements

The principal improvements over KOffice 1.5 are:

Kexi (Database application):

• Further enhancements in the database connectivity library.
• Further improvements in Table Designer (schema altering without removing table contents, "Image" data type)
• Data aware combo boxes (drop down lists)
• Data-aware "Image Box" widget in Forms and Table View

Krita (Pixel based graphics editor):

• Krita is now able to open huge PNG files with a size of at least 30000 by 30000. Please note that this only works yet on 64bits architecture; on 32bits the maximum size of a file is smaller).
• New filters has been added (random noise, random pick, lens correction, filters from krita-plugins...)
• Krita can open PDF files and transform them into a bitmap
• New tool for drawing bezier curves has been added

Kugar (Reporting tool):

• Kugar's templates are now visible in the startup dialog.

KPlato (Project management tool):

• Added PERT calculation for estimated value based on optimistic, expected and pessimistic value.
• The distribution used is dependent on the setting of Risk.

KFormula (Mathematical formula editor)

• OpenDocument and MathML are now native format. And OpenDocument is now the default file format
• The list of supported elements: mi, mn, mtext, ms, mstyle, msqrt, mroot, mfrac, mrow (others might work)
• The list of supported styles: mathcolor, mathbackground, mathsize, mathvariant

KFormula 1.6-alpha1 is an ongoing effort for a full native ODF / MathML support and thus, it yet has some known issues including operators, scripts, tables and content notation management, some visual glitches with new style support and saving problems (loaded and saved files won't match).

A more complete list of changes is available at the KOffice web site.

Compiling KOffice 1.6-alpha1

Library Requirements: KOffice 1.6-alpha1 requires the following libraries:

• kdelibs 3.3, 3.4 or 3.5, which can be downloaded following the instructions at the KDE website (for more information on these kdelibs releases, please see the KDE 3.5 press release);
• Qt-3.3, which is available in source code from Trolltech as qt-x11-free-3.3.0.tar.gz (qt-x11-free-3.3.5.tar.gz is recommended); and
• for reading help pages and other KOffice documentation, libxml2 >= 2.4.9 and libxslt >= 1.0.7.

Compiler Requirements: Please note that KOffice 1.6-alpha1 will not compile with older versions of gcc/egcs, such as egcs-1.1.2 or gcc-2.7.2. At a minimum gcc-2.95-* is required.

Source Code: The complete source code for KOffice 1.6-alpha1 is available for free download via one of the KDE http or ftp mirrors.

Further Information: For further instructions on compiling and installing KOffice, please consult the KOffice installation instructions. For problems with SRPMs, please contact the person listed in the applicable .spec file.

Corporate KOffice Sponsors

Besides the valuable and excellent efforts by the KOffice developers themselves, significant support for KOffice development has been provided by Mandriva (which sponsors KOffice developer Laurent Montel), Trolltech (which sponsors KOffice developer David Faure), theKompany.com (which has contributed Kivio and Kugar to KOffice), Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB (which has contributed KChart to KOffice), OpenOffice Polska which employs Kexi developer Jarosław Staniek and sponsored KDElibs for win32 project which enabled porting KOffice applications to MS Windows, Google which through the "Summer of Code" program supports Alfredo Beaumont to work on OpenDocument and MathML support for KFormula and Emmanuele Tamponi to work on a framework for curves in Krita. In addition, individual sponsors (donate), provide significant support for KDE and KOffice. Thanks!

About KOffice/KDE

KOffice is part of the KDE Project. KDE is an independent project of hundreds of developers, translators, artists and professionals worldwide collaborating over the Internet to create and freely distribute a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop and office environment employing a flexible, component-based, network-transparent architecture and offering an outstanding development platform. KDE provides a stable, mature desktop, a full, component-based office suite (KOffice), a large set of networking and administration tools and utilities, and an efficient, intuitive development environment featuring the excellent IDE KDevelop. KDE is working proof that the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software development model can yield first-rate technologies on par with and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

Please visit the KDE family of web sites for the KDE FAQ, screenshots, KOffice information and developer information. Much more information about KDE is available from KDE's family of web sites.

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Press Release: Written by Cyrille Berger.

Trademarks Notices. KDE, K Desktop Environment and KOffice are trademarks of KDE e.V. Incorporated. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Trolltech and Qt are trademarks of Trolltech AS. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

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