KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 Release Announcement

DATELINE June 6, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KDE Releases Technology Preview of KOffice

v, 2008 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Alpha 8, 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.

The Alpha 8 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:

Highlights

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.

Multiplatform release

This is the first KOffice release to be available on all three major platforms: Unix, Windows and MacOS X. This fact is the result of the work of the astonishing KDE-on-Windows and KDE-on-MacOS groups.

OpenDocument Improvements

One of the biggest concentrated efforts was made in the improvements of the OpenDocument Format. Especially the text shape that is the base of KWord saw much work, mostly through the full time work of the NLNet sponsored Girish Ramakrishnan. Another noteworthy addition is that KOffice can now save and load images.

Start of Sound Support

KPresenter now has support for playing sounds. This means that a presentation will be able to contain sounds that will be played during a presentation.

Support for Notes in KPresenter

KPresenter saw the start of support for notes. That is an important feature which was previously lacking.

More Information

More information about new KOffice2 technology can be found in the Alpha7-announcement and earlier 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. Some applications are more ready, though, and would like to receive user feedbacks on bugs:

• KSpread
• Krita
• Karbon
• 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 widen 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 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)

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 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.

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Press Contacts

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