Calligra 2.5 Office and Creativity Suite Released 67
jrepin writes "The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce version 2.5 of Calligra, the KDE's office and creativity suite. Words, the word processor, has among other things improved support for editing of tables, tight run-around of text around images, manipulation of table borders, and dragging of text. Sheets, the spreadsheet application has a new stand-alone docker for the cell editor and a new cell tool window with cell formatting controls. Stage, the presentation program, has a number of usability improvements. Flow, the diagram application, has support for new stencils in odf custom shapes. Kexi, the database application, now offers a full screen mode. Krita, the painting application, has a new compositions docker, useful in movie storyboard generation. At the same time as the desktop version, the community also releases a QML based version for tablets and smartphone: Calligra Active."
If there's one application here I'd like to see on a (pen) tablet, it's braindump.
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OK, Grandpa. Turn that TV down, upstairs!
The battery is running low on your hearing aid, again.
Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE's office suite reached the point where Excel and Word were in 1995! Great!
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, and for a lot of people (maybe 80%), that's all they need.
In fact Excel 95 was great. It even included a nice FPS game as an Easter egg.
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Yeah, and for a lot of people (maybe 80%), that's all they need.
But a lot of these people also need 100% compatibility (in both directions) with Microsoft Office documents.
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In that case they should be on Open / Libre / Neo Office not Calligra.
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a lot of these people also need 100% compatibility (in both directions) with Microsoft Office documents.
MS Office can open ODF files since years. So where is the problem?
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I don't see this as a wasted effort. Some people will find it useful. Other developers may see new features that they choose to also implement in other projects. The potential benefits are innumerable.
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Java (Score:4, Informative)
Calligra has Krita and other graphics tools too, which are pretty unique. Also the true RMS believers always steered clear from OpenOffice because it depends on Java.
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Choices of applications (Score:2)
I agree that there is a plethora of Linux distros. But in this case, there being another application like Calligra Suite is simething similar to the days when in Windows, you had a choice of MS Office, WordPerfect Office and Lotus Ami Pro. Yeah, they were 3 different companies making competing products, but one would hardly say that 2 of them should never have existed, and that everyone should have worked @ Microsoft (even though MS Office ended up being the default)
Also, as others have pointed out, Cal
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1, KOffice (the father of Calligra) has been developed since 1997. 3-4 years is nothing, especially in the FOSS world. You should rather complain about why Calligra had to fork from KOffice.
2, If you want a FOSS project that doesn't get forked every month, you need paid developers.
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the LO guys are stripping out all the Java even as we speak.
Actually no. They reduced Java dependencies but nothing more. LO is still full of Java.
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
KDE is fairly innovative.
We owe Webkit to their NIH syndrome for example. Additionally, Krita is an interesting app that doesn't really have an open source analog.
Their take on Kword has always been different than MS's take on word processing (which is where Libre Office gets theirs). I really like how the toolbars in KDE4 behave too, getting the interface totally native is a nice touch.
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KDE and OpenOffice (Star Office) were never designed to fill the same the niche. KDE integrates with the GUI while LO/OO/NO is GUI independent. I can easily break apart KDE Office functionality and widgets and use them in other KDE applications. I did this myself about a decade ago where I took many of the row and column management functions from KDE's spreadsheet and moved them to a thick client.
I think this situation is good. Long term Open Office should be conservative offering something like Micros
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Citation needed.
My memory puts Has staroffice as older than KDE itself.
Learn to read. He wrote that KOffice was started before the StarOffice source code was opened up to the public. That is true and you can look it up on Wikipedia.
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Well, for one, they may not even need all the stuff that Open/Liberty/Libre/Whatever Office has.
I'd venture go guess Calligra loads faster too, without all the StarOffice baggage.
Finally, I don't know if it has a macro language, but it would great if they bolted on a GamBas-style Basic language, API, and editor as opposed to the hellish OOBasic environment where you're supposed to start writing stuff from memory apparently, instead of Intellisense-type code completion you get with Gambas.
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Re:Finally! (Score:4, Informative)
Koffice has been using Kparts for a decade, I can only assume calligra hasn't reverted that.
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In terms of resource usage, that would be a good thing. I remeber reading articles around 98 bemoaning the death of software development. As cpus edged towards the 1 ghz mark, they noted how office 97 worked just as well on a 500 mhz computer as the 950 mhz. What on earth more could you do to an office suite that would require more cpu?
In my experience, calligra's predicessor koffice was always the most lightwieght office suite. If it actually did formating a little better, I would absolutely switch from li
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Which peaked in Office 97.
So they're only a single release behind.
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Other than the mousewheel, which was supported in Office 97, i'd be perfectly happy with Office 95.
I had Office 2007 on my Windows box. I would doubleclick a doc, Office 2007 Word would attempt to load. I'd realize my mistake in letting bad Office 2007 do anything, Id re-open the doc in Offce 97, perform my simple edit, close the file, and Office 2007 Word wouldn't even finished loading yet.
Yeah, my machine was "underpowered" - 1GB RAM, 1GHz Pentium 4 something, but realize that I still did everything I nee
HTML text editing in cells (Score:2)
Does this support HTML (richtext) editing in cells? I.e., different format for different words, not just the whole cell.
And then when you export it to CSV, it'll output "Bold text Non bold text" ?
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The text itself is not bold.
I messed up and put an HTML bold ( ) into my post, which made the text bold. I meant to put a less than sign, b, and greater than symbol.
So, what I meant was a cell having richtext editing, which would be outputted as HTML (which, of course, is plain text). Depending on the environment you're importing into, it may/should handle newlines within fields just fine.
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Possibly he meant to export the HTML-tags in the CSV, but slashdot parsed the tags to what we see.
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>Which would not be CSV anymore. CSV is by its format definition purely plain text tabular data separated by a delimiter.
Well, basically it all comes down to the environment that you're importing into. There's no law that says you can't put less-than and greater-than signs into a CSV field. Once you have that, you've got HTML.
The environment I'm importing into (Drupal) handles newlines within quoted fields just fine.
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Oops, I meant "some field", "<b>Bold text<b/> Non bold text", "next field"
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I think you are missing the point of the comments below.
CSV is a data format. Test attributes like bold aren't considered part of data. If on the other hand you define the field to be "HTML block" and not "text" then CSV could have formatting.
In general though people who are using CSV are OK with losing formatting. So the culture around CSV is not to do what you want. That's not a failure of KDE so much as it is a desire for an independent format that doesn't preserve formatting. ODF does preserver form
Publishing suites? (Score:2)
Is Krita now the equivalent of Windows Movie Maker (Score:2)
Krita, the painting application, has a new compositions docker, useful in movie storyboard generation.
Does that mean Krita can now be used to edit movie files, like Windows Movie Maker does w/ .wmv files?
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The Application names: Wow (Score:3)
They are imaginative but they do not hint to their function.
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Obviously the Caligula Office is a suite of tools for planning and marketing your sexual orgies and other perversity.
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Krita is actually the most descriptive of them all. at least in my language where krita = crayon. and even if it's supposed to be K-rita it still makes sense.
I like it (Score:1)
I tried Calligra and I like it. The suite is easy to customize, it doesn't have a lot of clutter and it is light on resources. My only issue with it is the lack of MS-Office support. I deal a lot with people sending me documents in various Office formats and Calligra will not save to MS-Office formats. Reading it does okay, but not writing and this is a big blocker for me. Hopefully they will address this soon as I would like to switch to Calligra full-time.
Nice ribbon-like UI (Score:3)
Seriously - that formatting toolbar that adjusts to the task at hand looks great. Displaying it as a vertical palette rather than a horizontal ribbon like MS Office makes a lot of sense for the wide screens I use most of the time.
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The way KDE (or perhaps QT?) handle "dockers" is fantastic.
The context sensitive one is more limited (right-dock or float), but the others can float, tab, or dock to the top, bottom, or right.
Similar to the newer Adobe Creative Suites (not 4+ maybe), but a little smoother working.
Can't tab the floating ones though.
why another office suite? (Score:1)
I'm not saying that seemingly duplicate effort is bad; it's a balancing act. The dominant player can become stagnant (e.g., gcc back in the day, XFree86, etc.) and sometimes you need a new player to shake things up. But when both players seem to be in the same area, or one is way behind the others, I don't see the point.
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They did it specifically to annoy people like you.
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With that kind of attitude we wouldn't have gotten WebKit. I mean why bother when Gecko exists, wasted effort clearly.
Well, KHTML started before open sourcing Netscape Communicator as Mozilla and even then Gecko didn't exist, yet.
According to the dates on Wikipedia, Netscape announced Mozilla just a few days before the KDE 1.0 beta 3 release which already included the Konqueror predecessor kfm. WebKit was just an evolutionary step from that.
Re:why another office suite? (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? Calligra is much older than Libre Office. KDE office was around when Libre was still Star Office. Neither one of them is new kid on the block unless you want to go back 15 years. If you do back 15 years...
the goal of KDE was to create a GUI for Linux. The Office suite has to follow the GUI standards.
Star Office was a port of a pre-existing 2nd tier office suite to Linux. They didn't follow the GUI standards but they were the furthest along when Sun acquired them.