KOffice.org

By Inge Wallin

The KOffice team is happy to announce the first beta of the upcoming 2.3 release of KOffice. This release brings many small improvements to all the KOffice applications, but not as many large new features. The most important new features being:

• Krita is now more or less ready for professional artist use. Some bugs remain in the beta, but those are expected to be gone in the real release.
• “text on shapes” which is available for all KOffice applications and makes KOffice able to show text on all shapes that are able to do that in the OpenDocument specification.
• The slide sorter view in KPresenter, which has been greatly missed by some users. There is also a new shape animations feature for KPresenter.

The new beta also offers many new features and improvements, bug fixes, and improved support for reading Microsoft file formats (doc, xls, ppt, docx, xlsx, pptx).

The 2.3 beta1 release of KOffice gives you a preview of what will be new and improved when the final 2.3 version is released in November. As you can see in the list of changes, there are many improvements.

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. 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. There are still some bugs in this beta release, but we expect that at the time for the real release of 2.3, Krita will be usable by real artists for their professional needs. 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 treeview 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 freeform 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 beta 1 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.3 beta1 will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Tags: announcement, release

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 21:08 and is filed under Announcements, KOffice Unstable, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.