KOffice 1.5 release : KOffice 1.5 Tour
Release Highlights: KOffice 1.5 Tour
This tour accompanies the KOffice 1.5 release and shows its most important highlights and gorgeous features. It is a comprehensive and easy to read tour through the major changes since the release of KOffice 1.4.
You can find the full announcement of KOffice 1.5 here.
Diving into KOffice
With recent releases KOffice has established its status as the most comprehensive office suite in existence.
No other office suite provides as many integrated and diverse components as KOffice. At the same time, KOffice
requires only little memory and provides good performance, making it suitable even for old hardware and avoiding
the need for expensive upgrades.
The list of stunning improvements for the 1.5 release is simply huge, and all of them were implemented
just within a couple of months. KOffice is picking up momentum, quite a lot as well. This tour gives a
comprehensive overview of recent highlights. Make yourself comfortable, and enjoy the KOffice Tour.
Core Technology Highlights
Starting up - It's all new
Usability experts worked together on a complete new design of the KOffice startup dialog. It is now
easier to use, more powerful and flexible. And above all, it's nice as well:
Native OASIS OpenDocument Format support
Finally, OASIS OpenDocument is the default native format for all major KOffice applications.
This is a major step towards interoperability of major office suites on the basis of an open
industry standard. OpenOffice.org also uses OpenDocument as native file format, other office suites
support it as well. Supporting the OASIS OpenDocument thus contributes to the open and free global standard
for office files.
Enhanced Accessibility
KWord, KSpread, and KPresenter include some enhancements for near blind users to have the text spoken of widgets under the mouse pointer and/or widgets that have the focus. It also adds a Speak Text option in the context menu of the KWord Document Structure Area, which is useful for speaking a document.
In addition, all KOffice programs were enhanced for mouseless operation with additional shortcuts and keyboard extensions. For instance, you can press Alt+F8 (customizable) and up pops a dialog which you can use to place focus on any widget that can receive focus.
See For Users with Disabilities in the KWord, KSpread, or KPresenter handbooks for additional information.
Unified Scripting Support
KOffice finally provides an unified scripting approach called Kross. With Kross you can write
Python and Ruby scripts for your KOffice documents.
KWord
Text selecting greatly optimized.
Fit to width zoom mode is saved between sessions and resizing the window
will mean that the zoom is automatically changed now.
KWord makes selecting/moving/resizing frames easier.
Center page on screen.
KSpread
Directly convert Excel files to OpenDocument Spreadsheets on the command line without even starting KSpread:
koconverter report.xls report.ods
KPresenter
Snapping guide lines (if you move an object to the guide line, the objects
will snap to the guide line).
Auto guide lines (automatically have guides to snap an object during moving
to other objects boarders).
As KWord also make selecting/moving/resizing objects easier by implementing
most features from http://www.koffice.org/developer/keyboardmodifiers.php.
Kexi
KOffice 1.5 contains the much expected final 1.0 version of Kexi - data management application that is the KOffice counterpart to MS Access or FileMaker. It is designed from the ground up as a standard KDE database application. Kexi can store it's data and design in a single database on a database server of file. This version focuses on the data exchangeability and server support.
Simple printouts allow you to quickly get high quality without a need of exporting data to external tools. Tabular layout is currently supported, with several printing options and fast print preview. The latter, unlike standard print preview in KDE, does not require to preprocess all the data before showing the result!
Example printout:
The feature takes advantage of KDE printing system, what means export to PDF is available as well.
CSV import and export makes your Kexi database interoperable with any application supporting CSV format (Comma-separated values). Thanks to unique format autodetection, Kexi automatically recognizes delimiters, text quote characters and even data types including date or time. All the options can be changed by user before data importing or exporting.
Forms are getting richer with every Kexi release. This time forms are fully data-aware, handle read-only and read-write data. Special right-hand Data Source Pane has been added to ease assigning data source to inserted text boxes. Images can be now inserted from file onto the form or pasted from clipboard and then saved within the single database losslessly.
As the Kexi Team listens to its users, MS Access (MDB, MDE) files support has been greatly improved. Files can be just clicked and then Kexi will propose importing using special Database Importing Wizard. MS Access database tables can be now imported with more accurately converted data types.
Importing Northwind sample Microsoft Access (.mdb) database using Kexi on Linux:
In addition to the new features, Kexi contains hundreds of small improvements and fixes making everyday use easier. Table, Query and Form designer are now smoother in usage. Despite so many features, Kexi still starts fast, because only needed functionality is loaded.
Unlike other database envirinments, the application communicates with users very verbosely when needed (it contains over translated 1500 messages), without cryptic warnings or error numbers. Kexi is already translated to 20 languages and another about 40 translations are in progress. This makes it as ideal also for educational purposes.
Kexi provides extensive scripting support. You can find more information on scripting Kexi here: http://kross.dipe.org/kexiscriptingoverview/
Kivio
New improved dockers which are shared with Krita and Karbon14.
A more powerful text edit dialog.
New docker that shows all objects on the page.
Automatic guide lines which is shared with KPresenter.
Karbon14
Tight selection of objects.
Gradient and pattern fill can be edited directly on the canvas.
Much improved dockers by using the KoPalette library.
Major svg improvements and basic odf support.
User interface polishing all around.
Printing fixes.
Krita
Krita 1.5.0 has a host of features unique in the free software graphical application arena. Let's begin with the beginning:
As you can see, Krita offers you a choice of colorspaces: 8 and 16 bit cmyk, 8 and 16 bit integer RGB, 16 and 32 bit floating point RGB, 8 and 16 bit grayscale, 16 bit L*a*b -- and even some more exotic colorspaces like LMS cone space or a watercolor simulation (the latter is still experimental). In future versions of Krita we will ad YCbCr (already used in the tiff file format filter) and more artistic colorspaces. All colorspaces (except watercolor and LMS) are color corrected using [http://www.littlecms.com|lcms]. All tools, from painting to gradients and almost all filters are usable in all colorspaces. Read about your colorspace choices in the Krita manual, completely new in Krita 1.5.
As you can see, Krita's palettes have been expanded and now include an Overview palette with zoom and panning control, a permanently updated Histogram palette and the brand new layers palette. Here, you can see a thumbnail of each layer, and if you let your mouse hover over the layer, you get an informative tooltip with a larger icon.
Non destructive effects have finally arrived: Krita makes it easy for you by allowing you to use nearly all filters in the new adjustment layer feature. From artistic to color correction -- and note the new curve widget.
Organize your complex layered images using layer groups for performance and easy handling. This image has a basic layer, and artistic oilpaint filter adjustment layer grouped together, with two more layers on top. We offer a grid in several sizes for easy placement of layers.
Krita is fully integrated with KOffice, and that means that you can create object layers that embed documents you can create in any KOffice application. Here we add a small text to our Krita image:
And here is how it looks when the embedded KWord is no longer active. You can even apply adjustment layers over embedded layers!
Using the innovative and flexible Kross scripting technology, first featured in Kexi, Krita is fully scriptable in Python and Ruby. A number of example scripts are provided:
And when all is said and done, you can save your image using the new png, tiff and jpeg export filters. Krita now can load raw, png, tiff, jpeg, photoshop (limited to version 6), gimp (limited) and many other file types. Krita can save in png, tiff, jpeg, bmp, gif and many other file formats.
KPlato
KOffice 1.5 is the first version to include KPlato, the KOffice Planning Tool. Please look at http://www.koffice.org/kplato/ for some details.
KChart
KChart is the charting component of KOffice. It can be embedded into almost
any other KOffice application, such as KWord or KSpread. It supports 8
different types of charts, among them bar, line, area, pie, ring and polar
charts. Almost every aspect of the chart can be customized after the chart
is created, such as colors, fonts and placement of different entities like
the legend.
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