[dot] The Road to KDE 4: New KOffice Technologies

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1167972566/

From: Troy Unrau <troy.unrau at gmail.com>
Dept: like-two-peas-in-a-pod
Date: Thursday 04/Jan/2007, @20:49

The Road to KDE 4: New KOffice Technologies
===========================================

   In this weeks' edition of the Road to KDE 4, we'll take a look at 
the up and coming KWord 2.0 as part of theKOffice
[http://www.koffice.org/] project. KWord 1.6.1 is  already a powerful
KDE-integrated word processor, but with KDE 4  technologies, KWord 2.0
promises to be among the most powerful free word  processors available.
Read on for more details.

     KWord is part of the KOffice suite of applications which, with a
few exceptions such as Kexi [http://kexi-project.org/], has been visible
thus far as a KDE-only application living under the shadow of the much
larger OpenOffice.org [http://www.openoffice.org/] suite. But this won't
always be so, as the new KDE 4 technologies allow KOffice to exist as a
native application on other platforms such as Windows and Mac OSX. Look
out for more details on KDE support for these platforms in a future
article.

     One of the biggest assets of KOffice and KWord is its native
support for the OASIS OpenDocument
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument] standard, which is shared by
many office applications these days (including OpenOffice.org, Google
Docs [http://docs.google.com/] and others). Expect improved ODF document
compatibility for KWord in the future as the developers strive for
complete specification support.

     Lets take a look at some screenshots from the development version
of KWord. Notice the nice anti-aliasing of every element of the UI. On
my system, it doesn't appear noticeably slower than KOffice 1.6.1. One
of the most improved areas in KWord 2 is the text formatting and
layouting, which definitely deserves some more exposure. It's not yet
complete, but as you can see below, it's definitely much improved from
previous versions. You really have to experience it yourself to
appreciate how smooth moving, resizing and rotating Flake
[http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Flake] shapes is in this new
version.



     All manner of objects are being converted to the new Flake library,
for instance KFormula elements, so you can insert nicely rendered math
into your documents without any trouble. This support could make KWord
as exciting to use for page layouts as KPresenter, as you are no longer
restricted to dull, square document shapes. These changes should enable
KWord 2 to behave as a respectable basic desktop publishing application.

     Also noticeable in this early preview version is the lack of spell
checking support, as this is being reworked for the upcoming Sonnet
architecture
[http://jrideout.blogspot.com/2006/12/how-is-sonnet-stacking-up.html]
for spelling and grammar corrections. (Which word did I misspell in my
screenshot?)


     But this is not the only improvement new to KOffice 2. Also in the
works is scripting support for applications through the new and
extensible scripting framework dubbed  Kross
[http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=KWord/Scripting]. It has
received a lot of work and looks to be one of the killer features of
KOffice 2.

     The following screenshot shows the new scripts menus in KWord:



     Also notice how I moved the tear-off toolbars from the previous
screenshot. I placed them by drag-and-drop, and they automatically
tabbed up. This is all done very smoothly by Qt with no noticeable
interface flickering.


     Of course, the same scripting and rendering features have made
their way into other KOffice apps as well. KSpread and scripting are a
perfect fit, and there is a lot of power exposed to the advanced user.



     For people interested in more details about Kross, check out this
article [http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=KSpread/Scripting] on
the development and usage of Kross in KSpread.

     These are just some of the many improvements in the works for KWord
and KOffice when the KDE 4 platform rolls out. Of course, these
screenshots are of the development versions, which are quite unstable at
the moment, but jugding by the level of activity today in the developer
channels (like #koffice on irc.freenode.org) there is a large amount of
momentum behind this release.


     KOffice has a separate release schedule from KDE 4, so they may or
may not release concurrently.