[kde-edu]: announcement

[Vladimir]

On Friday 12 October 2007 16:31:15 Inge Wallin wrote:
> On Thursday 11 October 2007 20:15, Vladimir wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > On Thursday 11 October 2007 21:43:31 Jos Poortvliet wrote:
> > > On 10/11/07, Vladimir <ks.vladimir at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > > If there is anything new since the last beta, please tell me!!!
> > > >
> > > > I've recently implemented embedding formulas in notes on the scene.
> > > > Not very big feature, but quite important for teachers. Plus several
> > > > important bugfixes.
> > >
> > > Maybe you can elaborate a bit more and tell me HOW it would be
> > > important for teachers, and it gets into the announcement... A link is
> > > highly appreciated, even if it's just a commit.
> >
> > When teacher creates a simulation to demonstrate some physical problem to
> > students, (s)he may want to annotate it: add text explaining the problem
> > and its solution. The text about physical problem will almost certainly
> > contain some formulas which teacher wants to add. (by the way this
> > feature was implemented after request from teacher Nikiforakis Manos from
> > Greece ;-) I've created the screenshot:
> > http://edu.kde.org/step/pics/note.png
>
> Wow!  If I ever saw a more perfect chance for integration with KOffice's
> Kformula tool (or rather: Flake shape), I don't remember it.  This makes it
> even more clear to me that we have to make available a lot of the KOffice
> technology to the rest of KDE.
>
> Some of it will happen in KDE 4.1, as Jos can testify about, but that's
> mostly OpenDocument stuff.  Maybe we should expand the scope of this
> technology transfer.  :-)
>

Yes, it would be very cool ! Actually I've closely looked at kformula code 
before implementing formula support (btw, currently done using latex), but it 
seems that there is no way of using it directly. As the target audience of 
Step are young students, it deffinitely needs formula editor easier than 
latex, but implementing it myself is quite a big task. Other KOffice 
components can also be very useful in Step, for example karbon14 for adding 
schemes and diagrams or kword for adding more complex texts. Unfortunately 
I'm not familiar with KOffice codebase and don't know is it easy task or 
not...

-- 
      Best Regards,
        Vladimir