• Able to now properly open LibreOffice documents
• A fix to the  loss of docker visibility when closing an application on the startup.

First, a little look back. Since the KOffice2.0 release now 2 years ago we made various releases with the 2.3.1 release being the most recent. The amount of features added and bugs fixed in each release is nothing short of amazing. Yet, the most heard complaints are of simple issues. Things that stop even the least demanding users from using it daily. In my last blog I suggested user profiles in the form of personas as means to focus on a solution. And this has had some good effects!

First the unexpected happened; several people disagreed strongly with the goals and wanted to continue rewrites and new features with as goal to make things faster and to implement features required for MSOffice compatibility. This caused discussions and a realisation why we were not making progress like we wanted to; different people were pulling KOffice in different directions.

After this was identified the pieces started to fall into place; we lost a lot of users from our last stable release of 1.6 till now. We lost a lot of developers or potential developers too because the koffice codebase kept on growing and with all the dependencies was not at all easy to compile. Next to that we were going more and more into the direction of a pure office suite. I’ll get back to that later, but I think we have to admit that a pure office suite is not exactly all that exciting as a spare-time hack-project. Many developers are not using a word processor or speadsheet/presentation app often enough to decide to program on it too.

We live in a world where MSOffice is present on the vast majority of office computers. This has lead to the conclusion we need to be good at interoperating with it if we want to compete with it. True enough, but I think the real question we forgot to ask is if we want to compete with MS and LibreOffice in what is essentially a saturated market. Any market share we want is at a cost of those big two.

The way forward for KOffice has been to first re-establish our goals and focus on those. Focus is best described as deciding what not to do. The decision was made to not add features that benefit MSOffice interoperability if that hurts KOffice’ goals. This decision has lead some developers that earn their income with creating exactly that, to fork KWord and take some applications like the databse app and the painting application with them that actually don’t fit very well in an office suite. This splitting of paths is a sad thing, but here in KOffice we are grown ups so we’ll live and a lot of good came out of it too. The positive effect is KOffice can gain focus on our actual goals.

So what are the goals of KOffice?

The concept of a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation application are all useful, but at the same time its not exactly a field that is ground breaking and it doesn’t really attract a lot of new users. If you want to become significant; you end up copying MSOffice, and you would not be the first to try.

The vision for KOffice is one where you can become productive and edit plus do professional layout of any type of content. People working in some office create a lot more than just text documents. Look around in soho and you’ll see what I mean.

The vision for KOffice decouples the applications from the content they contain. A word processor becomes a page-layout application. A presentation application has slides and animations.

Then as a separate pillar there are the content types; text, a vector graphics (for your arrows, circles etc), even a spread-sheet shape.

See what we did here? We brought back what it is that people expect from an office suite, but we didn’t get ourselves stuck in that 30 year old concept. With little effort the user can stop using his word processor to, well, edit text and instead she can turn it into a music-score editing application. She can edit and print knitting patterns. The possibilities are endless and since any of those can be provided as plugins to the main KOffice all those add-ons can come from any 3rd party.

Ok, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll try to be more clear about the ideas I have of the direction of KOffice in future blogs and if you have some ideas please share them in he comments.

My idea for KOffice is to make a set of applications that help people get their work done by being fun and with those plugins there are unimagined possibilities to get users to have fun and to get more types of work done quicker. Specifically the idea of what an office suite is should be challenged. Its useless to try to compete in an already saturated market by just copying the competition. Just like with KDE4 its much more fun to build a platform that allows both the old and imaginative new usages.

A first step has been made; KOffice is now split up and it moved to git. You will find the core libraries and the applications in koffice.git and next to that is a koffice-plugins.git. These are the new core of koffice and maintained by the koffice developers. Next to this are the plugins that are not (yet) part of the core. Some of them challenge what it is that an office suite should do. The music shape was a google summer of code project by Marijn Kruiselbrink and it allows the word processor to be turned into a musical score editor. Its not finished and looking for developers. There currently already are 6 projects available on git.kde.org; projects.kde.org/projects/playground/office

This split setup has the huge advantage that downloads and compile times will go down significantly. With the first release of koffice after this split and packages are made by distros it also will mean developers can compile and change plugins in a matter of minutes because they  live in their own git repos. No longer multi hours waiting times.

The newly strengthened goal of KOffice aims to make it easy to extend KOffice without having to modify the main KOffice source code. This means that the core devs can focus on making the applications usable while you focus on creating that cool knitting-shape or guitar-score shape for your girlfriend

• Krita now handles really large images, bigger than 50 Mb much better
• Several memory leaks fixed in Kexi.

More details of the 2.3.1 release can be found in the list of changes.
This version of KOffice is translated to no less than 27 languages. A new language for this release is Polish, which was previously not shipped.
Many Linux distributions package KOffice 2.3.1. We know that binary packages are ready for various distributions. 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.

• limit size of custom patterns to fit 1000×1000 — avoid memory problems
• fix error in memory handling. This means really large images are more feasible now
• disable the tile pooler, saving memory for really large images
• fix crash when editing a brightness contrast filter in the action editor
• Do not crash on startup when loading the tutorial if always start with template is checked (bug 261911, bug 261940)

Kexi

• Fix many memory leaks
• MySQL driver: add /var/run/mysql/mysql.sock to the list of possible local socket paths
• Donot crash if no table was selected to import.
• Fix saving recently visited directories for source and destination database in the migration wizard

KWord

• Fix  KWord header’s utf8 encoded text is not saved properly (bug 262684)
• Fix: KWord crash when trying to print (bug 262192)

KPlato

• RCPS scheduling: Set start/end times for summary tasks.

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.

• Krita is now ready for professional artist use. This is thanks to the very focused effort by the Krita team after a meeting which resulted in a clear vision and well defined goals. More details are available in Krita 2.3.0 announcement
• A new slide sorter view in KPresenter, which has been greatly missed by some users. There is also a new shape animations feature for KPresenter.
• Improvements of the core engine and plugins in the support of the OpenDocument Format. Especially text rendering has seen much work.
• Even more improved support for reading Microsoft file formats (doc, xls, ppt, docx, xlsx, pptx).
• A new report engine used in KPlato and Kexi.

KPresenter slide sorter view

A more comprehensive list of improvements is available in the full list of changes.

Readiness for End Users and External Developers

There have been a number of improvements, especially to libraries and plugins which have resulted in most of the OpenDocument standard now being covered for: loading, rendering and saving, which in itself is a big step forward. The most mature productivity application right now is KSpread, which we are willing to recommend for end user production work.

However, for the two other productivity applications KWord and KPresenter, the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve for end users. The applications should be stable enough for real use, but there are still many formatting options that cannot be handled through the user interface. For more information about ideas towards this goal for KWord, see our Personas page.

There is also some good news: During the development cycle for version 2.3, we have had the good fortune to get a usability expert, Thomas Pfeiffer, to donate his time and skill. We expect that this will bear fruit for the 2.4 release.

Regarding the creativity applications, the most mature application of KOffice right now is Krita (see above). Karbon was also already usable in 2.2, and has remained so.

Readiness of Kexi for production work depends on the needs of the users application. It is recommended to test the feature set of Kexi against specific needs. Since version 2.2, which was the first release in the KOffice 2 family, Kexi has improved mostly in terms of stability. There are a number of features from versions 1.x of Kexi that are not present in 2.x releases yet, but which are either planned for addition or are discontinued. For example, forms may need manual rework because of missing Auto Fields.

Sponsored Development and OpenDocument Community Work

Like 2.2, release 2.3 has seen significant contributions in development from external companies and organizations. Nokia has sponsored much work on the general improvements and the converters for importing MS file formats for their Maemo office viewers. KO GmbH as well as NLnet have sent participants to the ODF plugfest and OpenOffice.org conference in Budapest, Hungary.

As usual, Google has arranged the Google Summer of Code programme. This year, KOffice had 6 projects of which 5 are in this release:

• Benjamin Port worked on shape animations for KPresenter.
• Cyril Oblikov worked on the tree view shape that is mentioned in the changelog, but still considered experimental.
• Adam Celarek worked on next-generation color selectors for Krita.
• Marc Pegon made a new transform tool with free-form warping for Krita.
• Dmitry Kazakov created canvas mirror/rotation and a new multi-threaded rendering engine for Krita.
• José Luis Vergara Tolosa made a hatching brush, a bumpmap filter, and the beginning of an impasto feature, also for Krita.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3.0 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.3.0 will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 RC1 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 4 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 3 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Between 2.3 beta 1 and 2.3 beta 2 there have been 597 commits by 28 different authors.

• All applications have received bug fixes and improvements.  Krita is the application with the biggest team behind it and therefore also the most active one.
• Embedded formulas have had a general shapeup and now loads much larger parts of the mathML specification
• The import filters for Microsoft formats continue to be improved at a furious rate.  We are now starting to see cases where the look of a document in KOffice is better than in any other free office suite.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 2 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.