Some like to make a joke of OpenOffice.org coming with around 8 different string-implementations and comparing that with what we are having in Calligra with QString. But when we worked back then in OASIS to form what later became the ISO OpenDocument standard we left such implementation details out.

As Andreas note we are rather close towards Calligra 2.4 which will be the very first release of the Calligra Suite.

Our pretty cool Calligra Quality Dashboard lists 11 remaining release-critical blocker bugs that still need to be fixed till then.

this blog-positing got removed meanwhile cause somehow it's never sync'd to the dot for whatever reason. Well, good that I've a second account where it works :)

End of last week the work done on the new textlayout-library got merged into the master-branch. Months of hard work on refactoring the basement Words, Stage and other Calligra applications are build up on got a face. While there still stays enough work we got beyond the mountain and are enjoying the fruits this brings us today and tomorrow.

This fruits, from the pov as developer and user of Words, are;

After day 0 on friday which I missed and day 1 on saturday where I joined the Calligra 2011 sprint in Berlin in the evening after a longer journay the last day of the sprint, day 2, is coming to and end.

This weekend there will be the Calligra spring 2011 in Berlin in KDAB's office in berlin where I usually work and play kicker and table tennis all of the week. The irony is that I very likely will not make it to the sprint. I was visiting some friends in Koh Tao and I am now caught in a heavy storm in Koh Samui since more then a week now. My fly was canceled and the airport was closed, my visa was running out and cash problems raised up.

Rendering slides is a complicated business. Slides can contain tons of different features just like webpages can. People expect that presentations look the same in different programs. Perhaps not pixel-perfect but very similar nevertheless.

OpenOffice and KOffice (and the Maemo/Meego Office Viewer) both have ODF as their main file format. ODF is an open standard and this means exchanging data between these programs should be simple and lossless. To help the developers of these programs find differences in rendering of slides, I have written a program that loads a presentation and shows it as rendered by KOffice and OpenOffice.

As an added bonus, it also shows how these programs render PowerPoint files. PowerPoint files are converted to ODP first and then loaded into each of the two rendering engines. That gives four types of output:

• Converted by OpenOffice to ODP and rendered by OpenOffice
• Converted by KOffice to ODP and rendered by KOffice
• Converted by KOffice to ODP and rendered by OpenOffice
• Converted by OpenOffice to ODP and rendered by KOffice

You can see an example view in the screenshot and screencast below.

The code has been announced on the koffice mailing list.

Ogg Theora screencast of SlideCompare
Flash screencast of SlideCompare

Today, Nokia released the first public version of the office document viewer for the Nokia N900 phone. It was uploaded to the Maemo repositories. This version supports text files, spreadsheets and presentations in OpenDocument format (ODF) and Microsoft Office formats. The viewer requires the latest update (PR1.1) to the N900 software. You can install 'Office Viewer' by adding the maemo-devel repository to your N900 catalogues:

Catalog name:

Maemo Extras-devel

Web address:

http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel

Distribution:

fremantle

Components:

free

Then the application 'freoffice' will be available in the category 'Office'. The install is 9 megabytes.

With the viewer, you can open multiple files at once, open office documents from your e-mail, search in office files and copy and paste from your documents. A very nice feature is the ability to give presentations with the phone. Here are some screen shots of the viewer running on the N900.

The code for this viewer is available in the KOffice repository. New releases of the viewer will be uploaded to the repository as KOffice progresses towards version 2.2.

The viewer has a simple user interface and responds quickly to user input such as page changing and scrolling.