KOffice 1.6 Release Announcement

DATELINE October 16, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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KDE Ships New Release of Free Integrated Office Suite

October 16, 2006 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice version 1.6, the long awaited version with major improvements in a number of areas.

Highlights

The 1.6 release is intended mainly as a feature release for the two fastest developed components: Krita and Kexi. This version also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning application. However, other components are being actively developed too - with astonishing results. Here are the highlights of this release:

Krita Steps Up Into the Realms of Professional Image Editing

With this release Krita steps up and becomes usable for professional image editing. Krita and its maintainer won the prize for "Best Application" in this years KDE conference in Dublin. With features such as magnetic selection, effect layers, color model independency, and full scriptability, it has risen to become what is probably the best free image editing program today. For more details look in the Principal Improvements below, or the complete changelog.

Kexi Adds Many New Features

Kexi, the desktop database application competing with MS Access, is the other application in KOffice that is already the best of its kind. Kexi has received over 270 improvements since version 1.0 (KOffice 1.5). With this release, Kexi gains such features as the ability to handle images, compact the database, automatic datatype recognition and Kross scripting tools. Other parts have also been much developed with both new features and ease of use in mind.

KFormula Goes to OpenDocument and MathML

The formula editor of KOffice now supports OpenDocument and MathML and uses it as its default file format. It also surpasses the equivalent component in OpenOffice.org, scoring 70% on the W3C MathML test suite, compared to 22% for OpenOffice.org Formula. The KOffice team sees this as one of the many examples where the work to provide a very well-structured codebase of KOffice pays off to provide superior support for the existing standard.

Scripting Support in KSpread, Krita and Kexi

KOffice 1.6 brings scripting to a new level with scripting functionality in KSpread, Krita and Kexi. Scripting is provided through the cross-language script bridge Kross, which enables KOffice to be scripted in Python, Ruby with possible future extensions of Javascript and Java. With this release, KOffice also introduces pure command-line scripting where e.g. spreadsheet documents can be automatically manipulated with scripts to create many new usecases.

Principal Improvements

The principal improvements in KOffice 1.6 over KOffice 1.5 are:

• Added scripting with Kross.

Kexi (Desktop Database application):

• Further enhancements and optimizations in the database connectivity library.
• Further improvements in Table Designer: "Image" data type, undo and redo commands, support for default values, and tooltips.
• Improvements in Query Designer: defining sort order for column in both visual and SQL view
• Data-aware "Image Box" widget in Forms and Table View, major improvements in the Auto Field form widget
• Support for macros

Krita (Pixel based image editor):

• Support for handling perspective in drawings, including perspective transformation, perspective grid and perspective clone
• Added support for layer masks
• A new magnetic selection tool has been created.
• Many new filters have been added: random noise, random pick, lens correction, filters from krita-plugins
• Krita can open PDF files and transform them into a bitmap
• New tool for drawing bezier curves has been added

KPlato (Project management tool):

• Added PERT calculation for estimated value based on optimistic, expected and pessimistic value
• The distribution used is dependent on the setting of Risk.

KFormula (Mathematical formula editor):

• OpenDocument and MathML are now native format with OpenDocument as the default
• The list of supported elements: mi, mn, mtext, ms, mstyle, msqrt, mroot, mfrac, mrow (others might work)
• The list of supported styles: mathcolor, mathbackground, mathsize, mathvariant

Kugar (Reporting tool):

• Kugar's templates are now visible in the startup dialog.

A more complete list of changes is available at the KOffice web site.

About KOffice

KOffice is an integrated office suite, today mostly for KDE, which utilizes free and open standards for its document formats, component communication and component embedding.

This release includes:

• a frame-based, full-featured word processor (KWord);
• a spreadsheet application (KSpread);
• a presentation application (KPresenter);
• a flowchart application (Kivio);
• an integrated database application (Kexi);
• a new project management application (KPlato).
• a pixel based image editing and paint application (Krita);
• a vector-drawing application (Karbon14).

Additionally, KOffice includes robust embeddable objects:

• business quality reporting software (Kugar)
• full-featured charting engine (KChart)
• mathematical formula handling (KFormula)

as well as a built-in thesaurus (KThesaurus) and support for many different file formats.

KOffice and all its components (including KDE) are available for free under Open Source licenses from the KDE http and ftp mirrors.

Corporate KOffice Sponsors

Besides the valuable and excellent efforts by the KOffice developers themselves, significant support for KOffice development has been provided by Mandriva (which sponsors KOffice developer Laurent Montel), Trolltech (which sponsors KOffice developer David Faure), theKompany.com (which has contributed Kivio and Kugar to KOffice), Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB (which has contributed KChart to KOffice), OpenOffice Polska which employs Kexi developer Jarosław Staniek and sponsored the KDElibs for win32 project which enabled the porting of KOffice applications to MS Windows, Google which through the "Summer of Code" program supports Alfredo Beaumont to work on OpenDocument and MathML support for KFormula and Emmanuele Tamponi to work on a framework for curves in Krita. In addition, individual sponsors (donate), provide significant support for KDE and KOffice. Thanks!

Press Release: Written by Inge Wallin

Trademarks Notices. KDE, K Desktop Environment and KOffice are trademarks of KDE e.V. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Trolltech and Qt are trademarks of Trolltech AS. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

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