KWord 2.0 progress

After working on Flake for the last couple of weeks I refocussed on KWord earlier this week. KWord needs an amazing amount of refactors to get the best out of the new features both Qt4 and Flake provide, so this left me with a dilemma on where to start and how to approach this best. I decided to go for the mechanic ways. You know what I mean if you ever saw a mechanic who took a whole car apart, with a garage full of parts and starts to reassemble it afterwards. I am doing the same in software. Good for me that I don't have to take kword apart first, I'll just copy the parts I need :)

I've started working on the basics, a canvas, a document and pages first. Not only for the obvious reasons but also because they needed to be reworked anyway. In the new revision I put in some new features that we kind of had support for in 1.5 Page Spreads. This is the concept of having 2 pages that the user edits as one. Consider the usage that you have a big image that you want to print over two pages. You would really like to have 1 image in your document and position across the two pages so it gets printed properly. This always was impossible in just about all word-processors. KWord now has this high-end feature. See here:

After pagespreads worked I went on to put text on the pages, as already visible in the previous screenshot this also has a nice new feature. The margins for left/right have gotten a little more intelligent and now allow you to set it to be mirrored between left and right pages. So you get a small border closest to the binding creating a much nicer booklet output.

Last point I want to show today is how KWord 2.0 will benefit from the new Qt text engine by eliminating the most complained about problem; having correct WYSIWYG. See this screenshot for 1 piece of text being shown in two different zoom levels and they both look excellent!

Have a good weekend!