KOffice 2.0 Alpha 6 Release Announcement

Feb 20, 2008 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Alpha 6, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0.

Highlights

This is mainly a technology preview for those that are interested in the new ideas and technologies of the KOffice 2 series. The Alpha 6 release is a work in progress. This release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. All the applications saw big changes, both bugfixes and new features.

KOffice 2 is currently under heavy development. It is not meant as something to be used for any real work and can crash at any point. However, here are some of the highlights of the upcoming KOffice 2 series. Note that not all of the new technologies will be fully implemented in the first release, 2.0.

Also note that although KOffice developed in close relationship with KDE 4, it has its own release cycle.

Snap guides

Many KOffice applications like Karbon now have snap guides that will guide the user when he or she is placing objects near other objects in any direction.

Another new feature is a much improved infrastructure for OpenDocument, something that is not visible to the user, but very important for the interoperability between KOffice and other office programs.

Improvements in Krita

Krita has seen a lot of improvements lately. Many are of features that existed in version 1.6 and that have now been ported to the new infrastructure of version 2. See the changelog for more details

Karbon and KPlato Getting More Mature

Karbon, the vector drawing application in KOffice, has matured considerably during the last months since the last alpha release. The changes are too many to enumerate, but one important feature is the ability to edit gradients in a user-friendly way.

Another application that has matured for KOffice 2 is KPlato, the K Planning Tool. It is a project management application that has seen much development during the last months. We expect KPlato to make a nice addition to the functionality of KOffice 2 when it is released later this year.

More information about new KOffice2 technology can be found in the Alpha5-announcement and earlier or in the release notes.

About KOffice

KOffice is an integrated office suite built on the KDE platform, and utilizes free and open standards like OpenDocument 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 the following helper applications:

• 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.

Announcement: 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 ASA. 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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