[dot] KOffice Interview
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stories at kdenews.org
Wed Oct 6 10:33:49 CEST 2004
URL: http://dot.kde.org/1097051569/
From: Fabrice Mous <fabrice at kde.nl>
Dept: where-works-is-being-done
Date: Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @10:32
KOffice Interview
=================
A few weeks ago KOffice 1.3.3 was released
[http://dot.kde.org/1095608979/], the third bugfix release in the 1.3.x
series. The people of Golem.de [http://www.golem.de/] conducted an
interview [http://www.golem.de/0408/33132.html] with David Faure,
maintainer of KWord and the KOffice libraries about KOffice. They have
sent us the English version for publication on the KDE news website for
your reading pleasure.
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David
[http://static.kdenews.org/fab/screenies/koffice/david_at_fosdem.jpg]
Faure, maintainer of KWord and KOffice libraries
KOffice has evolved over the last years. New software components
were added. Where do you see KOffice today and what are the main steps
KOffice has taken?
New KOffice components have indeed been developed recently: Kexi,
the database application (somewhat similar to Access) is looking quite
good already, and Krita (bitmap image editing) is under heavy
development. The start of a project-management application (KPlato)
needs more developers though.
I think this is the strength of KOffice compared to its open-source
"competition": having developed a solid enough foundation (Qt
"platform", kdelibs technologies, and koffice architecture) to make it
appealing to develop many office-suite components, as proved by the
number of KOffice components existing already.
The main step taken by KOffice since 1.1 has been to implement a
common text engine for KWord and KPresenter based on Qt's "QRichText"
engine. This is used up to the recent 1.3.2 release. I'm currently
working on support for the Indic scripts in our version of that text
engine.
Since then, the work has been on reworking spell-checking
completely, and the OASIS file format which we'll talk about later on.
Kword
[http://static.kdenews.org/fab/screenies/koffice/kword.png]
Which parts of KOffice still require the most work?
An office suite is a huge thing to develop. Work is needed in
almost every part of it, and it's hard to simply follow users's demands
as everyone's "must have" feature is a different one. More
specifically, I can see that the immediate future is going to be:
finishing the OASIS file format implementation and working on the
document converters to make them use the OASIS format, then looking at
whether to rewrite our text engine (as well as KWord and KPresenter) to
be based on Qt4's new text engine (dubbed "Scribe"), which looks very
promising.
The main flaw in KOffice-1.3 is the WYSIWYG implementation, and the
idea is that Qt4 will solve that problem (I've been assured that work is
happening towards this).
Another area where work is hopefully going to happen is scripting:
there are talks about using KJSEmbed, the powerful and flexible
scripting engine based on KJS (konqueror's javascript interpreter), for
scripting in KOffice. But apart from that, entire applications require
the most work: KFormula, and KPlato, could definitely do with some new
developers :)
Karbon14
[http://static.kdenews.org/fab/screenies/koffice/karbon.png]
You are working in the OASIS technical committee on the definition
of a standard file format for office suites. KOffice supports the file
format from OpenOffice.org that has been submitted to OASIS. Do you
consider this format a good base?
More than that, I made sure that this format would be a good base
for KOffice :) That's what my job in the OASIS technical committee is:
ensuring that the file format can be used to express everything that
KOffice supports. But I definitely think the OpenOffice.org file format
was a very good basis for the OASIS format, since it was designed, from
the start, as a file format that should be as independent as possible
from the design of the application. It reuses standards like XSL/FO,
CSS, HTML etc. as much as possible, so the goal is to make the OASIS
format another one of those formats, where the application used to edit
the document doesn't matter. Realistically though, given the amount of
features available in office suites, it is going to be long way until
all features are available in both office suites implementing that file
format (OpenOffice.org and KOffice, for the moment).
Kivio
[http://static.kdenews.org/fab/screenies/koffice/kivio.png]
The biggest problem for office suites is the installed base of
Microsoft Office with lots of files in proprietary formats and special
software like macros for this system. How could KOffice overcome this
problem?
KOffice has some Microsoft Office document converters, although
those could definitely use more work as well. But given the lack of
manpower in KOffice, I don't think anyone is going to be able to make
those converters 100% complete, nor implement support for Microsoft's
VBA macros. The target audience of KOffice seems to be mostly people
creating new documents, rather than people trying to work on legacy MS
Office documents :) In any case, the good thing about sharing the same
native format as OpenOffice.org is that people will be able to use
OpenOffice.org to transform their MSOffice documents into OASIS
documents, editable by both OOo and KOffice :) Not that OOo's converters
are 100% complete either, of course...
KPresenter
[http://static.kdenews.org/fab/screenies/koffice/kpresenter.png]
When KOffice was released with KDE 2.0 there was no other open
source office suite for linux. But especially with OpenOffice.org there
is free solution that fits most peoples needs. What's the advantage of
KOffice and why is it nessecary to continue the development of this
software instead of joining forces with other projects like
OpenOffice.org?
I get this question all the time, obviously :) First, a number of
users have assured us that they prefer KOffice. For performance reasons
(speed and memory), for its integration with KDE, for its user-friendly
user interface, and for its wider variety of components (OpenOffice.org
doesn't even have an equivalent of Kivio or Kexi).
KOffice also has a more flexible architecture, as proven by the
"KOffice Workspace" application which allows to use all KOffice
components together, by the possibility to view KOffice documents in
Konqueror (which also uses the KOffice KParts components directly), or
by the fact that its document converters are available from the
command-line using "koconverter".
Kexi
[http://static.kdenews.org/fab/screenies/koffice/kexi.png]
Without wanting to say bad things about the competition - I have
much respect for the OpenOffice.org project - I also feel that KOffice's
codebase is much easier to get into, and somewhat more cleaner. The
code for the MS Word converter in OpenOffice.org is impossible to get
into, especially for a non-german speaker (all the comments are in
German!). The build process and the internationalization process of
OpenOffice.org also have bad reputation (especially with linux
distributors), whereas KOffice uses the standard KDE (in fact gnu)
mechanisms. It also seems Sun's control makes is difficult to change OOo
too much, whereas developers are (almost) completely free to do what
they want when working on KOffice :)
The presence of two competing office suites is also a good thing in
the grand scheme of things: if KOffice didn't exist, there would be no
such thing as a "standard" OASIS file format for office suite documents.
There would be something called as such, but how can something really be
a "standard" until it's used by more than one application? Looking at
the needs of two office suites is what really made it possible to clean
up the file format and make it somewhat implementation-independent. Of
course if any other office suite wanted to switch to OASIS as the native
file format we might have to extend the format some more, but at least
we can say it's generic enough to fit two office suites already, that's
a good first step.
Krita
[http://static.kdenews.org/fab/screenies/koffice/krita.png]
Would you welcome a better integration of OpenOffice.org in KDE?
Sure, why not. It makes OpenOffice.org KDE users happy. Doesn't
change much for KOffice users though :-)
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