KOffice 2.0 Alpha 10 Release Announcement

DATELINE August 27, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KDE Releases Technology Preview of KOffice

August, 2008 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Alpha 10, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0.

Like the previous alpha releases, this is mainly a technology preview for those that are interested in the new ideas and technologies of the KOffice 2 series. Note that KOffice 2.0 is only the beginning: not all features we are laying down the foundations for today will already be available in our 2.0 release.

Highlights

KOffice 2 is currently under heavy development. It is not meant to be used for any real work and can crash at any point. The Alpha 10 release is a work in progress. This release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. All the applications saw big changes, both bugfixes and new features. However, we would still like to mention some things especially:

KPresenter Presenter View

Fredy Yanardi and Thorsten Zachmann have worked on making KPresenter a presentation application again and have implemented different ways of viewing a set of slides.

KWord is about styles

Much work has been done on page, paragraph and character styles in KWord. There is a new, hierarchical style docker that makes selecting a style for your text a snap. And KWord, as well as all other KOffice applications, profits from the shape style docker that makes it easy select the foreground and background style of all shapes.

Ultimate drawing experience in Krita and Karbon

Lukas Tvrdy, helped by Boudewijn Rempt and a host of academic papers, has implemented a new brush engine for Krita, meant to simulate Chinese brush painting, but which turns out to be a great basis for all bristly painting materials. We were ourselves surprised when the French artist and Krita tester Enkhitan turned up with this work, entirely painted with the new brush engine:

More Information

More information about new KOffice2 technology can be found in the changelog, or in the visual changelog and earlier announcements or in the release notes.

(Bug Reports and User Feedback )

While for most KOffice applications, bugs reports on the KDE bugzilla bugs.kde.org are not yet needed since there are too many visible problems, applications are more ready, and would like to receive user feedbacks on bugs:

• Karbon
• KPlato
• Krita (Note: filters are broken in this release. This problem is already solved and the fix will be in the first beta release of KOffice 2.0)
• KSpread
• The report component of Kexi

This list will be expanded as soon as the developers of other application think their application is ready for a more wider testing.

About KOffice

KOffice is an integrated office suite built on the KDE platform, and utilizes free and open standards like OpenDocument for its document formats, component communication and component embedding.

This release includes:

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

Additionally, KOffice includes the following helper applications:

• full-featured charting engine (KChart)

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

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Announcement: Written by Cyrille Berger and Boudewijn Rempt

Trademarks Notices. KDE, K Desktop Environment and KOffice are trademarks of KDE e.V. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Trolltech and Qt are trademarks of Trolltech ASA. 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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