05: October 2005
October 29, 2005
While much of the rest of KDE is in feature freeze preparing for the imminent release of KDE 3.5, KOffice developers are starting to work hard for their 1.5 release, scheduled for in between KDE 3.5 and KDE4. This release will be able to be used with KDE 3x and Qt 3x, and will have a great deal of improvements over the current stable version.
Support for the OASIS OpenDocument format has been greatly improved for better standards compliance and better interoperability with other applications. With OpenDoc now the default format of Open Office.org 2.0, this truly open format brings many benefits to those who work with documents created on other platforms and other programs. Documentation has been improved across KOffice applications.
Palettes now have a smart mode where they start floating on small screens and docked on larger screens. Palettes now remember their position between sessions in Krita, Karbon and Kivio.
Accessibility:
For the mouse challenged, KOffice now includes the ability to quickly move focus to widgets on the screen using the keyboard. Press the Alt-F8 shortcut (configurable of course) and letters and digits appear on all the widgets on the screen that can receive focus.
Press one of these keys to put focus on the corresponding widget. There’s also a shortcut that permits you to resize, dock, and undock those pesky splitter and dockwindows using the keyboard.
Gary Cramblitt, KDE’s text-to-speech maintainer and accessibility guru says he’s made it his personal goal to make KOffice 1.5 fully accessible for the mouse challenged and partially sighted.
KSpread:
In KSpread, Robert Knight has recently implemented formula editing with colour syntax highlighting. While editing formulas, ranges can be redefined simply by dragging the red size grip. The sort dialog has also been improved to display column and row names rather than the previous cryptic display for selecting sort criteria. KSpread also has benefited from a completely new formula engine.
KWord:
KWord has had it’s OpenDoc support strengthened in preperation for it to be made it’s default format, and has had it’s frame and table handling refactored. A new feature in the works allows documents to start at any arbitrary page number. Variables such as time, date, number of characters etc. now work completely, fixing Bug (#111478)
Karbon:
Karbon developers have been in a whirlwind of activity, fixing bugs left right and center. This will provide a more stable base for new features coming soon.
114421 Transform palette has a strange layout when it is tall
114424 Stroke properties palette has a strange layout when it is…
114425 Color palette has title “Fill color” even when it shows s…
114428 The last created object should stay selected
114577 The Document/Layers/History palette is not shown on start
114579 Deleting polyline segment moves the mouse pointer to (0, 0)
114580 JJ: The line thickness SpinBox has no tooltip
112765 Selecting a polyline and running the “round corners” plug…
60438 undo confusion between point and shape action
Krita:
Krita is one step closer to world domination with support for NetBSD and many crash fixes. Performance has been improved, and the user interface has been optimised to reduce the amount of space tool docks take up. If you use KDE 3.5, Krita and Kwin can work together to hide floating docks within the application when the application window is out of focus, somewhat like some applications under OSX. Krita now boasts some impressive professional-level features, being one of the first open source image applications with support for CMYK. There is now a tool for viewing histograms of images and layers, and if an image has more than 8 bits per channel the histogram can be zoomed in on. (Click for larger image)
Painting styles have been seperated from tools, now allowing any tool (freehand, star etc) to use any painting style (airbrush, pencil, eraser etc). Tablet support has been improved with a configurable pressure curve, and new effects filters have been added including reduce noise, round corners and pixelise. Support for threaded filters has been started, improving performance on machines with multiple CPUs. If you’d like to test-drive the latest Krita features why not get set up with Klik and click your way to installing the latest Krita?
Kexi:
Maintainer Jaroslaw Staniek has been busy with improving how Kexi now handles image data. The form designer displays data retrieved directly from databases. It’s enough to insert a file into form’s surface or paste it from clipboard and click “save”. A new “Data Source Pane” can be used to conveniently assign data sources for various form elements like text fields. Fields can be also inserted onto the form by drag and drop.
Image files are stored in unmodified state allowing you to later retrieve them and even save them back to file with their original name.
Helping out
If you’re interested in getting your feet wet in KDE development or want to help out those super cool KOffice developers, the KOffice team are maintaining a page of junior jobs at http://www.koffice.org/getinvolved/junior-jobs.php.