[dot] KOffice 1.6 Released

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1161037713/

From: Inge Wallin <inge at lysator.liu.se>
Dept: the-akademy-award-winning
Date: Monday 16/Oct/2006, @15:28

KOffice 1.6 Released
====================

   The KOffice team is proud to announce
[http://www.koffice.org/announcements/announce-1.6.php] the 1.6.0
release [http://www.koffice.org/releases/1.6-release.php] of its office
suite.  This release is mostly a feature release of Krita and Kexi, but
also contains major enhancements to the OpenDocument
[http://www.odfalliance.org/] and MathML [http://www.w3.org/Math/]
support of KFormula and new scripting functionality. This version also
contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning
application.  Download packages for Kubuntu
[http://kubuntu.org/announcements/koffice-16.php], SuSE
[http://download.kde.org/stable/koffice-1.6.0/SuSE/] or you can try
before you install with the KOffice 1.6 live CD
[http://www.koffice.org/download/kofficelivecd.php].

     The 1.6 release is intended mainly as a feature release for the two
fastest developed components: Krita and Kexi. However, other components
are being actively developed too, with astonishing results. The
highlights of this release are:

    * Krita Becomes Usable for Professional Image Work
      Krita and its maintainer Boudewijn Rempt won the Akademy Award for
      "Best Application" [http://dot.kde.org/1159194107/] at this
      year's KDE conference in Dublin.  With features such as magnetic
      selection, effect layers, colour model independence and full
      scriptability, it has risen to become what is probably the best
      free image editing program today.
    * Lots of New Features in Kexi 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 KOffice 1.5. With this
      release, Kexi gains such features as the ability to handle images
      [http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2163], compact the database
      [http://www.kexi.pl/media/en/compact_db/], automatic datatype
      recognition and Kross scripting tools.
    * KFormula Implements 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 [http://www.w3.org/Math/testsuite] compared to
      22% for OpenOffice.org Formula. We see this as one example where
      the work to provide a very well-structured codebase of KOffice
      pays off to create a 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
      [http://dot.kde.org/1152490640/], which enables KOffice to be
      scripted in Python and Ruby with possible future extensions
      through Javascript and Java.  With this release, KOffice also
      introduces command-line scripting where, for example, spreadsheet
      documents can be automatically manipulated with scripts to create
      many new usecases.

     This will be the last non-bugfix release until version 2.0, which
will build on Qt 4 and KDE 4 technology. For more information, see the
full announcement
[http://www.koffice.org/announcements/announce-1.6.php], the detailed
release notes page [http://www.koffice.org/releases/1.6-release.php], 
and the complete list of changes.
 [http://www.koffice.org/announcements/changelog-1.6.php]