KOffice.org

By Cyrille Berger

Since the work on version 2.3 of KOffice began, there have been over 4700 commits to the source code — excluding Krita. The changelog of Krita can be found on the Krita website. Nearly 70 people have been active in the development without counting the many translators. The large number of changes makes it impossible to give a comprehensive list of all the changes so we will have to make the list a bit briefer.

KWord

195 commits. KWord development continued to focus on the core layout engine, which received many fixes for crashes and layout errors. Additionally:

• Page background support was improved
• Support for images with text run-through enabled was improved.
• Page spread support was improved: they can now be printed.
• Loading ODT files is now significantly faster.
• Page style settings now work.

KWord Filters

• DOC filter: Many improvements
• DOCX filter: Many improvements

KPresenter

193 commits. Lots of bug fixes, of course, but also some new stuff.

• KPresenter now comes with the templates created in the KPresenter Template Contest — a great set of beautiful, varied templates!
• The page transition effects have been extended by a “fade over color” effect, a “crossfade” effect and loading and saving page transitions has been improved.
• Benjamin Port implemented SMIL animations for KPresenter — a great achievement, even if there’s still more work to be done! Especially text animation is worth mentioning.
• Jean-Nicholas Artaud implemented a slide sorter.
• It’s now possible to add more than one picture at the same time.
• Finally, KPresenter can now export to HTML.

KPresenter Filters

• PPT filter: Many improvements
• PPTX filter: Many improvements

KSpread

467 commits. With Marijn Kruisselbrink as the new maintainer, KSpread development has taken off, with the former maintainer, Stephan Nikolaus returning to activity as well. KSpread 2.3 sees major improvements to:

• Performance
• Text rendering
• Formula compatibility. A number of new functions were added, improving support for OpenFormula, as well as for files originating in Excel.
• Usability, especially in an international context like right-to-left layouts.

KSpread Filters

• XLS filter: Many improvements
• XLSX filter: Many improvements
• New filter: New XLS filter that doesn’t write to ODF but imports directly to a document. This filter is almost twice as fast but not enabled by default in the beta.

Kexi

205 commits. Kexi was new in KOffice 2.2 and has now started to add new features:

• Improvements to the CSV Export dialog:
  
• Added export of reports to the ODT file format (for opening in KWord or any other word processor and application that support ODT).
• Added a plugin framework to reports.
• Object tabs can be moved in the main window and are simpler now:
  
• Completely new Project Navigator pane added, compliant with the KDE 4 style:
  
• Images are now scaled smoothly in forms.
• The Widgets Tree pane of the Forms Designer is back:
  
• Improved support of MS Access file: now large “memo” values (i.e. long text) can be imported.
• Fixed escaping of strings in the PostgresSQL driver.
• Improved stability of the SQLite driver: previously there was a possible crash scenario on closing.

See also the full list of changes and information about Missing or discontinued features.

KPlato

177 commits. KPlato 2.3 has the following improvements:

• Improved the basic project template
• Fixed problems with scripting
• Reworked the reporting facility using the new reporting library
• Improved the performance view and also improved the performance majorly.
• Fixed many crashes, bugs in the task editor
• Improved the unit test suite
• Fixed BCWP Calculation when task is started early or finished late
• Fixed cost breakdown
• Improve drag-n-drop
• Fix scheduling and resource availability
• Use a better charting engine (KDChart, the same as the chart shape) for charting.

Krita

1120 commits. Krita saw a major push towards user-readiness. The Krita team focused on two main areas: performance and stability. Some details:

• Painting is up to fifty times faster, while refreshing the display is up to twenty times faster
• Krita now makes use of all your cores and CPU’s, for rendering the displayed image, painting, filtering and more
• The OpenGL canvas is now much more stable
• New feature: canvas rotation
• New feature: a configurable and extensive color selector
• New feature: a transform tool with a cool warp mode
• New feature: a bumpmap filter
• Faster convolution (for blurring and sharpening)
• Support for images that do not fit in the computer’s memory
• Several new brush engines (for instance, for hatching and sketching)
• Brush settings preset management
• Many improvements in usability, thanks to Peter Sikking’s advice. In particular, the new slider is much nicer to use with a tablet stylus. You can now pan with the middle mouse button and shift-drag to change the size of your brush
• Make it possible to rotate and scale predefined brush
• Create new brushes from selection
• HSV color adjustment for brushes
• An new powerful color selector docker
• The brush outline is adjusted to follow the transformation of the brush
• New fade sensor for brushes
• New experimental sketch brush that mimics Harmony project
• Improvement in color picking
• Global curve for pressure mapping
• Mirror sensor in pixel brush
• Replace rate from the tool options with airbrush setting
• Dynamic softness for pixel brush and soft brush masks
• Improved bristle-brush with sensors, anti-aliasing, connected path of bristle
• Added default button for brush engines
• Improved rotation of particles in spray brush

Karbon

58 commits. Karbon was the application that saw the least number of commits. However, it is also the one that relies the most on the common plugins and libraries of KOffice. New features and improvements in Karbon 2.3 are:

• Correctly saving the page layout
• Loading shapes from the master page style
• Centering on the selection when zooming

Common to All KOffice Applications

Improvements in the plugins and libraries will benefit all KOffice applications.

Plugins in general

640 commits.

• Support for color management using LCMS or LCMS2 is now a plugin to the pigmentcms library
• Many improvements to the vector shape, which support showing EMF and WMF files embedding in Microsoft Office documents. (Not part of the 2.3 release)
• A new tree shape plugin (not part of the 2.3 release)
• Many improvements to the text shape plugin, which is the basis for text rendering in all KOffice applications
• Contextual spell checking now works correctly
• The picture shape plugin, which renders embedded images, is now much more robust and has support for effects like gray scale or watermark
• A new shape plugin is added for document comments

Shapes

• New feature: Pictures now support modes: gray scale, monochromatic or watermark. They also load image-opacity
• Bug fix: adding a text shape adds eleven undo actions
• New shape: Comment shape for use in kpresenter
• New shape: Plugin shape for storing plugin data and for not losing data when reading unsupported draw plugins in frames

Major Shapes

Chart Shape

71 commits.

• The unit tests were improved, focusing especially on testing ODF support
• A new version of the KDChart library (improving the range of supported chart types as well as fixing a number of bugs)
• Support for Scatter charts
• Support for Bubble charts
• Support for Stock charts
• A great number of crashes were fixed

Formula Shape

68 commits. KFormula is now much more dependable as an embedded formula shape for KOffice documents.

• Embedded and in-line formulas are supported
• The formula shape is now interoperable with OpenOffice and supports proper ODF-specified namespacing
• Compliant with MathML through use of the “semantics” element
• The test suite was enhanced a lot, but existing parts were also given a thorough overhaul

Libraries

714 commits. Work in the libraries focused on improving the compatibility of KOffice with the OpenDocument Format and improvements to the core component technology — Flake. There have also been many bug fixes and performance improvements especially for loading documents.

• New feature:Add concept of readonly / readwrite so using KOffice apps as kparts won’t allow you to modify a document you would not be able to save later
• New feature: Add new feature; show/hide all dockers
• New feature: Ask before an existing file is overwritten when exporting to PDF
• Dragging a new shape onto a document is now showing a proper shadow outside the canvas
• Fixed the drawing of the canvas shadows after scrolling or zooming
• It is possible to see the effect of the progress bar on loading
• Fixed the bug for where startup screen showed up distorted by making the splitters more evenly spaced
• Fixed koreport dependency issues. This should make packaging more logical

Filters

1196 commits, delivering mainly improved support for the import of Microsoft Office documents, both the old binary formats as well as the newer OOXML formats. With 2.3, we have reached as high a compatiliby with Microsoft Office documents as is possible with the current state of the KOffice core engine — and in many cases the engine was improved as well to improve compatibility with Microsoft Office. We also saw great performance improvements here especially for the XLS filter. Support for EMF and WMF embedded images was added, as well as initial support for SmartART.

Tools

235 commits, mainly focussed on FreOffice, the mobile office suite built on top of the KOffice core. FreOffice is not part of the KOffice release but released separately. However, it is worth mentioning all the work put into FreOffice this summer by the interns working at Nokia Bangalore. These interns have pushed what can be expected from mobile office suites beyond all current boundaries. Enjoy their work on your N900! In particular, we saw:

• Editing of documents
• Presentation mode with TV-out on a mobile phone
• Shake-based slide transitions,
• OpenGL based slide transitions
• Support for metadata based on RDF to be used in interaction with the phone’s hardware. Example: if the metadata contains a phone number, the telephone can place a call to it without dialing.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 31st, 2010 at 02:21 and is filed under Changelogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.