KOffice 2.0 Alpha 5 Release Announcement

Nov 21, 2007 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Alpha 5, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0.

Highlights

This is mainly a technology preview for those that are interested in the new ideas and technologies of the KOffice 2 series. The Alpha 5 release is a work in progress. This release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. One such change is that more resources like gradients and strokes are now shared between all the applications. All the applications saw big changes, both bugfixes and new features. At the KDab and KDE e.V. sponsored sprint in Berlin, many important decisions were made. and a release schedule was agreed upon.

KOffice 2 is currently under heavy development. It is not meant as something to be used for any real work and can crash at any point. However, here are some of the highlights of the upcoming KOffice 2 series. Note that not all of the new technologies will be fully implemented in the first release, 2.0.

Also note that although KOffice is included in KDE 4.0 RC 1, it has its own release cycle, and the first version of the KOffice version 2 series is expected around late Q1 2008.

More Shared Infrastructure

The general libraries saw several enhancements. First, there is improved sharing by making resources like gradients and strokes shared. All applications are now using the same implementation of these features, something that will reduce bugs and heighten the users feeling of a unified application suite. Another change is that the basic routines for handling the OpenDocument Format have been broken out into its own library. This is not a user-visible change, but important nonetheless because it is this library that was suggested will be made available for other KDE developers in kdelibs 4.1.

Other new features are improved rulers, a central docker for the document structure and a new connector feature for shapes. This is good news for Kivio, the flowchart and network editor, that has so far not seen much work is now easier to make work.

Simplified Word Processor: Kids Office

Over a year ago, Inge Wallin proposed a simplified word processor to be used in school for kids. Thomas Zander, the KWord lead developer, made a proof of concept of this using the infrastructure of KOffice 2. This proved simpler than even Thomas would have believed, and KOffice 2.0 Alpha5 now contains a first version of the KOffice for kids. Note that only the GUI is simplified, and that it still contains the full power of KOffice. This means that it can save and load the OpenDocment Format, which will make it easy to interact with other users of OpenOffice.org or the full KOffice suite.

New Drawing Tools in Krita

The Krita team is working hard to make Krita the best free pixel based image editor in the world. This version introduces so called Chinese Brushes and a new Path Tool. It also now has all the filters that Krita 1.6 had again, as well as a first-cut implementation of on-canvas filter previews.

More information about new KOffice2 technology can be found in the Alpha4-announcement and earlier or in the release notes.

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 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 the following helper applications:

• 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.

Announcement: Written by Inge Wallin

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.

Press Contacts