KPresenter is making great progress on the way to KOffice 2.3.

But we are still lacking good templates for creating new presentations. That is where we need your help and that is why we are happy to announce the KPresenter template contest. Create new templates for cool presentations, be it KDE themed, Free Software themed, business themed or school project themed — or whatever tickles your fancy, and your work could be part of the next release of KPresenter. So sharpen your digital pens and get started!

As noted above, see the contest page for all the details.

Week 28 proved to be a very busy week, with about 120 commits and a nice spread all over KOffice and FreOffice.

Code

Arjun Asthana committed the first version of a collaborative editing mode for FreOffice — a KOffice first. We have had a Google Summer of Code project before that promised collaborative editing, but that never came to anything.

Benjamin Port improved the saving of object animations in KPresenter

Boudewijn Rempt removed some unused code in KSpread when working on a plan that should make it possible to use KOffice not just on QWidget-based surfaces, but also QGraphicsView (and who knows what else). Boudewijn started on QGraphicsWidget-based canvas for KSpread as a first proof of concept. QGraphicsView started out as a canvas class where thousands of graphical objects could be inserted into a graph, shown in many views and interacted with. A bit like KOffice’s flake library, actually — but these days it is also used as the foundation for alternative widgets sets and user interfaces, and the KOffice community decided in Essen it wants to be part of that as well.

Carlos Licea implemented conversion of Comments from PPT files for KPresenter, as well as an extension to ODF to make it possible to actually load those comments. ODF itself doesn’t really have an equivalent, so we use the officeooo namespace for these comments. Carlos also implemented saving the comments to ODP files.

Casper Boemann worked mainly on the DOC filter: he fixed a crash when loading styles, implemented support for loading drop caps from DOC documents and improved handling of character styles. There was some discussion about what to do when the paragraph that starts with a drop cap has fewer lines than the drop cap is high. Looking at other applications, OpenOffice then shrinks the size of the drop cap, Scribs starts the next paragraph under the dropcap and MS Word and In Design continue the next paragraph next to the drop cap, keeping the paragraph indentation, and the issue at had was which example KOffice should follow.

Cyril Oblikov fixed a number of bugs in his treeview Summer of Code plugin.

Cyrille Berger improved the API of KoCanvasController, following a change that broke his out-of-tree maintained flake-based Braindump application. Cyrille is also our release dude, and despite being busy moving house, he managed to push out the KOffice 2.2.1 bugfix release.

Dag Andersen added the concept of resource teams to KPlato. This is one of the big improvements Dag intented to develop for KOffice 2.3 and it’s great to see the feature land!

Gopalakrishna Bhat fixed a bug where FreOffice would hang when giving a presentation, and fine-tuned his presentation highlighter tool. He also added a dbus interface to the presentation tools in KPresenter (like draw and highlight) to KPresenter itself. This means you can control KPresenter during a presentation: combined with a bluetooth demon that knows this api, you can control your presentation using your N900. Imagine walking around on stage, drawing on your N900 and the sketch shows up on the screen, or moving to the next slide by giving your phone a good old shake!

Inge Wallin improved support for importing embedded documents from Microsoft Office 2007 documents, made the headers and footers imported from PPTX presentations work better and fixed some regressions caused by his breakneck speed of development.

Jaroslaw Staniek committed a patch by Pavel Heimlich that made it possible to compile Kexi again on Solaris.

Manikandaprasad Chandrasekar came back from his well-earned holidays and committed a new plugin for KOffice: google-docs integration. This means you can check the documents you have in the “cloud”, open them in the relevant KOffice application as ODF, edit them and save them back. All the creature comforts of KOffice and all the warm sharing fuzzies of Google!

Matus Uzak worked mainly on the DOC import filter. He improved the loading of floating pictures, implemented handling cell padding for tables, improved the handling of master pages and continuous section breaks and the wrapping of text around tables.

Pavol Korrinek implemented support for diagonal borders in the DOC import filter.

Pratik Maheshkumar Vyas did janitorial duties on FreOffice, cleaning up in general. He fixed a number of bugs and optimizations,

Sebastian Sauer fixed issues with loading font sizes in PPTX documents, fixed a crash in the handling of lists in KOffice’s core text handling library and committed a final fix for improving list indentation.

Srihari Prasad GV continued working on the new html-odf import/export filter. Their new approach, suggested by Jos van den Oever involves using xslt transformations following the direction of the webodf project.

Sugnan Prabhu implemented navigation through slides in the slide preview in FreOffice.

Sven Langkamp fixed the erase composite op so it cares about the selection mask, added a warning when the user tries to overwrite an existing pdf file and finally fixed the loading of background images from ODF documents.

Thomas Zander committed the first version of his text-on-shape feature. This is not finished yet, since he notes that loading and saving are still suboptimal alignment and autogrow are not implemented yet. He fixed a bug in KWord where the cursor could disappear of the screen.

Release

KOffice 2.2.1, a bugfix release of the 2.2 series was duly released on Thursday. KOffice 2.2.2 is scheduled for August/a> and will probably be the last bugfix release for KOffice 2.2.

The KOffice team is happy to release KOffice 2.2.1, the first bugfix release in the 2.2 series. This release contains no new features but a number of bugfixes for most of the components in KOffice 2.2. More details of the 2.2.1 release can be found in the changelog. This version of KOffice is translated to no less than 27 languages.

Many Linux distributions package KOffice 2.2.1. We know that binary packages are ready for at least Kubuntu (10.04 and Maverick, the upcoming 10.10), Fedora F13, and Debian Unstable. If you wish to build KOffice from the sources, you can download them at downloads.kde.org. You can find instructions on how to build them on the KOffice wiki.

Week 27 was Akademy Week Inge, Marijn, Jaroslaw, Benjamin, Jean-Nicholas and Boudewijn all attended Akademy. FreOffice, the mobile KOffice application was mentioned during Valtteri Halla’s Keynote. Someone in the public asked what Nokia/Meego was going to do with their “fork” of KOffice. But this is the amazing thing: there is no fork of KOffice. FreOffice is developed right inside the KOffice source code repository and used the KOffice core libraries and applications unchanged to create the world’s first and only free and open source mobile office application. Inge gave a well-received presentation on KOffice and there were a number of KOffice BoF sessions, mostly concerned with the way KOffice works both on the desktop and on mobile platforms.

Code

We had about 90 commits to KOffice, excluding Krita, in week 27. Last week I have tried to order the news by component, but that didn’t work out for me: it took too much time, so this time I’ll do it by committer again. Lots of lovely stuff happened!

Benjamin Port add text animation. Loading works now, and for rendering visibility, rotation, width, height, x and y are supported. It’s now possible to make text in KPresenter appear paragraph by paragraph! Very nice milestone for Benjamin’s Summer of Code project. Read all about it in his blog

Carlos Licea started work on reading OLE objects in XLSX files, showing the preview for EMF files embedded in XLSX, made it possible to store OLE and EMF objects and their preview images so they can be saved out again and finally implemented the saving, nicely finishing this feature in under a week.

Casper Boemann improved support for loading drop caps from .DOC documents. Improved support for dropcaps in KWord itself is still pending review.

Cyril Oblikov made it possible to move mindmap trees from parent object to parent object and implemented four types of layout for the tree: OrgUp, OrgDown, OrgLeft, OrgRight.The layout can be selected pressing <1>, <2>, <3>, <4> while the tool is active. Good progress on this front, in other words.

Cyril’s Google Summer of Code mentor Cyrille Berger fixed a deadlock in pigment when colorspaces were used from multiple threads.

Dag Andersen fixed glitches in the performance chart in KPlato, fixed the progress dialog and improved date/time accuracy.

Gopalkrishna Bhat re-enabled the presentation tool for FreOffice — there was some commit confusion earlier, but if you bould FreOffice you can use it now..

Inge Wallin fixed a number of bugs in the vector shape, which is used to show EMF graphics loaded from Microsoft documents

Marijn Kruisselbrink improved the speed of loading .XLS files a lot during Akademy.

Miroslav Nohaj made KWord text tables support the “exact row height” property loaded from .DOC documents. He also fixed a deadlock in the picture shape, where some pictures would never be shown if you zoomed in on a page in KWord. He also implemented support for loading extra-short month formats from .XLS and and .XLSX

Pavel Korinek fixed the display of overlapping images with the run-through attribute set. He also implemented support for the .DOC “special-border” feature

Pramod Soganegopalkrishnabhatt and Srihari Prasad GV committed the initial work on a new HTML filter for KWord. The current HTML filter was never ported from KWord’s proprietary file format to ODF, and is no longer operational, so a new filter is very welcome!

Pratik Maheshkumar Vyas committed editing functionality to FreOffice. This functionality is already in the newly released FreOffice you can install on your n900!.

Sebastian Sauer implemented automatic decimal place adjustment in KSpread, fixed loading embedded and nested lists in KPresenter and finished by fixing the indentation of list items in KPresenter and KWord.

Stefan Nikolaus fixed clearing the cell contents when hitting delete in KSPread and re-enabled the alignment actions.

Thomas Zander fixed a problem with printing text and improved the speed of text layout.

Thorsten Zachmann optimized the loading of character styles, fixed the display of dates in KPresenter and added a new feature: you can now load a set of images in KPresenter and have slides generated automatically for each image.

Releases in Week 28

On Tuesday, Mani Chandrasekar released a new version of FreOffice for the n900. I can confirm that the upgrade is pretty painless! And there is much cool stuff in here.

This week, KOffice 2.2.1 will also be released with a host of useful bugfixes. Debian packages are ready already.

I am writing this in a sweltering college room in Tampere, where we are having the annual KDE e.V. meeting. In response to the previous issue, it was suggested that it might be nice to group the activity by application, so let’s try that this time! (Note after writing: this about triples the time I need for Last Week in KOffice, so I’ll revert to work-done-by-person for the next issue.)

These two weeks saw 278 commits (excluding Krita), which is a pretty nice level of activity!

Cyrille Berger has also tagged KOffice 2.2.1. There are quite a number of nice bug fixes in there that improve on KOffice 2.2.0. It will be released next week!

(more…)

Week 24 was a very active week for KOffice. Apart from Krita, there were 114 commits, plus considerable activity on reviewboard.
Some work has been done on collecting information for users who are interested in installing KOffice, but more’s needed. And we’ve got a list of who is who and works on what now, it only needs
to be sorted, converted and added to KOffice.org.

This report in this format is a bit experimental for KOffice, so don’t hesitate to give me your feedback! This time, I’ve sorted by committer in alphabetical order, but I might change to describing the changes by topic.

Code

Google Summer of Code student Benjamin Port was amazingly productive, making Thorsten Zachmann, his mentor, very happy. Read his blog! Benjamin is working on implementing animation of objects on pages. This is a huge task, since ODF incorporates the SMIL standard for animations, and that’s a big document. Ben implemented support for SMIL duration, translations and keytimes — and fixed crash in page navigation. Another thing Ben committed was a sophisticated HTML export option for presentations.

Cyrille Berger made the colorspace registry thread-safe.

Dag Andersen improved the translatability of KPlato. One amazing thing about being part of KDE is all the translations there are. Translators really should get more kudoes, so here’s a cheer for the translators and their hard work!

Inge Wallin improved support for Stock charts, reorganized KChart: the application is not really alive, but the chart plugin is, and that’s now grouped with the other shape plugins, like the text shape. Finally, Inge improved support for loading slide layouts, master pages and backgrounds for .pptx presentions.

Jaroslaw Staniek improved support for image boxes in Kexi and backported Kexi fixes to the 2.2 branch.

Jean-Nicolas Artaud fixed some problems with loading documents with bookmarks in the Microsoft .doc format.

Johannes Simon fixed a bug in the charting library, discovered by Dag Andersen.

Lassi Taneli Nieminen worked on the .docx filter: headded support for ordinal numbered lists, improved footnote support (correct numbering for footnotes still needs to be implemented in kword), improved loading of comments and improved endnote support.

Marijn Kruisselbrink added support for loading horizontally justified alignment to the xls filter — and to KSpread, since KSpread didn’t support that yet.

Matus Uzak added support for manual page breaks to the .doc filter and fixed some bugs in the ODF the .doc filter emits.

Michael Drueing stepped in and has started fixing compile errors with Microsoft’s Visual C++ compiler. This is very welcome!

Pavol Korinek created a small workaround for a bug in OpenOffice: OpenOffice doesn’t save the background of an object if it’s default (and default is a weird blue in OpenOffice). We have a special class, KoOdfWorkarounds where we store all the compatibility code needed to be interoperable with OpenOffice — and in the future other applications that write buggy ODF. This is not an indictment of OpenOffice: all code contains bugs, we just try to play well together.

Sebastian Sauer implemented loading of charts in .docx and .pptx documents.

Former KSpread maintainer Stefan Nikolaus has returned to KOffice hacking with a vengeange! In week 24, he fixed painting of the row and column titles, right mouse button interaction for the row and column titles, right-to-left (RTL) layouts, improved autoscrolling, improved the RTL support of the Cell tool, fixed drag-and-drop in RTL sheets. He restored the “Insert series…” functionality, fixed sheet repainting, improved cell validation, and fixed the Goal Seek dialog and command.

Thorsten Zachmann made it possible for KPresenter to load extra attributes for page transitions, added a fade-over-color page transition effect, improved the loading performance of paragraph styles and fixed undo of deleting objects.

That’s it!

For this week. More next week!

Last Week in Krita is quite a success, whenever I get a chance to update it, so it seemed like a good idea to do the same for KOffice: keep everyone who is interested, developers, contributors, users — everyone — up to date on what is happening in the KOffice community. I don’t promise it will be exactly every week that I will post these updates, but like for Krita, I will try to do it really often. Me, by the way, is Boudewijn Rempt. I’ve been a KOffice developer since 2003, Krita maintainer since 2004, I’ve been release dude until Cyrille Berger took over the baton.

So, without further ado, hot from the sprint: what is happening in KOffice!

Sprint

The KOffice community tries to join up twice to year for some intensive face to face hacking, discussions and socializing. The first sprint of this year was in Essen Horst, in the wonderful Linux Hotel. Now this is an environment that does a hacker good! Sunshine, free soft drinks, beer and wine, a lawn, a cosy dining room, a great hack room, wonderful bedrooms, great connectivity and quite close to Deventer, where I live. Not that that is the most important thing, but it is easy to reach.

There were slightly under twenty people. Friday was mostly socializing and some patch review. Saturday was tough: we had a meeting from 9:00 AM to 18:00 PM with only a break for pizza. Sunday again was a day for hacking, and for discussing smaller items.

You can read the meeting minutes on the developer wiki. The minutes are very rough, so I’ll present the gist of it here.

First, we honestly and fearlessly recognized that despite the recent spate of KPresenter love, we don’t have many users for KOffice. We even discussed whether we care about having lots of users, because that might conflict with a desire to hack for fun, which is a valid goal for a free software project.

It’s not even impossible that FreOffice, the KOffice-based Office Viewer for Maemo, has almost as many as the desktop version of KOffice, if we consider KPresenter, KSpread and KWord. Two sessions were devoted to this issue: first we spent identifying reasons for the lack of users, and secondly we created a list of high-priority missing features. Some things have already started being implemented, like a draft for a good page about downloading/installing KOffice. Other things are much more long term. And people don’t use stagnant software, so we’ve started, well, this series of articles.

Second, with equal candour we asked ourselves why so many parts of KOffice have so few developers. This is a big worry: while there are some 40 regular contributors, there are also many components. Applications like Kivio have been dormant for ages. Karbon has been a one-man show for years. KPlato ditto. And while the number of developers has grown, it is mostly because people are paid directly or indirectly to fix issues in KOffice that are vital to make the mobile variant a success. Here, too, we didn’t plug our heads in the sand ostrich-wise, but came up with a list of recommendations. The first issue, the sometimes rather difficult patch review process has been made explicit and streamlined. Another thing is that people don’t get interested in hacking on something that’s perceived as dormant, we hope this series of articles will get people interested. Read the minutes for the full, rather unedited, list.

Thirdly, we were wondering about platforms and portability. And not just portability between Windows, X11 and OSX — though that has its own challenges — but by making it possible to have different interfaces on top of the KOffice engine. Right now, FreOffice uses KOffice internally, but has a custom interface. In the future, we might want to put a web frontend on top of KOffice, running the engine in a server. Or something else altogether. A promising platform where KOffice could play a role is Meego, for instance, were KOffice could provide services to apps. We’ve been hacking on KOffice for more than ten years, and would like our work to remain relevant in the future. So this issue is vital, and everyone present committed to making KOffice much more portable and reusable. Nokia is a great help here and have promisted to document all the issues they had when putting a new face on top of the KOffice engine.

This really was the most important part of the Saturday discussions, and it can be summarized as:

• 2.3 is for users. Let’s make it so!
• we want to make it fun to hack on KOffice
• KOffice should go places!

Of course, everyone prefers hacking to discussing, and Sunday we had some good technical discussions and equally good hacking! Not to mention pizza on the lawn! This was easily the most positive, productive and fun KOffice sprint in years. And like usual, we even forgot to toast to the release of 2.2!

Thanks go to the KDE e.V. and its sponsors for sponsoring this sprint and to Alexandra Leisse and Inge Wallin for organizing it!

Summer of Code

Six people are working on KOffice Google Summer of Code projects. Cyril and Marc have had a slow start: both have had some projects and exams to finish. But Cyril has already been bugfixing and Marc has started for real this week. Cyril is working on a mindmapping application, while Marc is creating a transform tool for Krita.

Adam Celarek has committed the first version of his new color selection dockers. These are also useful in Karbon and KPresenter. Pentalis and Dmitry’s work is more deeply focussed on Krita agin. Both have been committing like mad!

Bad News about Karbon

Karbon is one of the little-known jewels of KOffice. It’s a full-featured vector drawing application with support for SVG and ODG. There is all kinds of cool stuff — even filters on vector objects are possible. I’m a raster kind of guy, so my vector foo is extremely limited, but people tell me that it is very usable — it performs well, has the right features and usability-wise it’s quite good. And after the initial development by Rob Buis last century, it was mostly developed by one person: Jan Hambrecht.

However, Jan has had to stop his involvement in KOffice, so Karbon is the third orphaned application in KOffice, after Kivio and KFormula. And this application is really cool and a lot of fun to hack on! So, if anyone is seeking fame eternal and a really cool hobby, don’t hesitate to contact the KOffice developers on #koffice on freenode.not, the forums or the koffice-devel mailing list.

Next…

Next week I’ll start doing an overview of code changes as well.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.2.0, half a year after the release of KOffice 2.1. This release brings an unprecedented number of new features and bugfixes as can be seen in the full list of changes. There are two reasons for this very high development rate: People have started to notice KOffice again and the developer community is growing and the fact that Nokia is sponsoring development of KOffice for their office viewer. Here follows a list of the most important changes in this release.

(more…)

The KOffice team is happy to announce the first and hopefully only release candidate of the upcoming 2.2 release of KOffice. This is the final prerelease before the final release of version 2.2, so we urge our users to try it out and test it.

As usual, this release offers many improvements and bug fixes, as can be seen in the list of changes. Most of the reported bugs on the so called “release blocker list” have been fixed. The rest will be fixed before the final release. A release blocker is a bug that is either a crash that prevents the user to use the application or a bug that leads to unacceptable data loss. They are marked with a special keyword in the bug database. A regression within the unit test suite can also be regarded as a release blocker.

A more thorough description of what is new in KOffice 2.2 in relation to version 2.1 can be seen in the announcement for version 2.2 beta 1.

Readiness for End Users and External Developers

As also mentioned in the 2.2 beta 1 announcement, the KOffice team had hoped to have time to make the user interface and available feature set ready for end users as well as make the underlying engine ready for external extension developers in time for 2.2. Unfortunately time and limited developer resources didn’t permit to reach both of these goals. The libraries have been reorganized and improved, but the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve.

Notable exceptions to this are Krita, that has seen much work on the user interface and Karbon that was already usable before.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.2 RC can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.2 RC will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

The KOffice team is happy to announce the second beta of the upcoming 2.2 release of KOffice. This release offers many improvements and bug fixes, as can be seen in the list of changes.

A more thorough description of what is new in KOffice 2.2 in relation to version 2.1 can be seen in the announcement for version 2.2 beta 1.

Readiness for End Users and External Developers

As also mentioned in the 2.2 beta 1 announcement, the KOffice team had hoped to have time to make the user interface and available feature set ready for end users as well as make the underlying engine ready for external extension developers in time for 2.2. Unfortunately time and limited developer resources didn’t permit to reach both of these goals. The libraries have been reorganized and improved, but the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve.

Notable exceptions to this are Krita, that has seen much work on the user interface and Karbon that was already usable before.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.2 beta 2 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.2beta 2 will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.