As you probably know, I work on KOffice. Have been doing that since before the first release and I did most of the (flake)libs and KWord work in the sprint to the upcoming Koffice2.0 release.

A big reason for working on KOffice is that its fun! Another, at least equally big reason is that I believe KOffice is the best open source office suite for the long term. And so follows the question; What makes a successful open source project?.

If we look at what others have said on the subject we come to the conclusion that the things that count most are these 3 points;

You can find more blogs from here at this space; labs.trolltech.com

KWord in trunk (we recently got an alpha2 out) is not the same piece of software as it was in KOffice 1.x, its gotten such a makeover both internally as externally that its largely unrecognizable (in a good way). This also means that old known functionality may have problems due to it being new code.

When I woke up this morning I found this on #koffice

Some time ago I blogged about how KWord can now run around the outline of any shape you place in its text flow. One thing I have had on my TODO ever since was allowing a user to create a custom run-around outline that is separate from the outline of the actual shape we run around.

Yesterday morning I woke up and realized that actually its not that hard to do, and even while it was a feature for post-2.0 I sat down and did it anyway. Just 2 hours later I had a working prototype and this morning I dotted the I's and committed the stuff.

It works like this;

Every now and then I start kbugbuster and browse the bugs database for KWord. I can then happily close a dozen or so bugs without having to code anything. The reason for this is that basically KWord has undergone a rewrite for 2.0; when we switched to Qt4 and the basic text engine was replaced with Qt4s-scribe and the frames were replaced with Flake it turned out it wasn't useful to refactor the code but more to merge in old code when and where possible.

If you ever did anything with multithreading you'd know mutexes. They are basically a building block to do any multithreading work in.

In java they are better known as 'synchronized blocks'. Your basic hot zone can be protected by a combination of myMutex.lock(); /* do stuff here*/ myMutex.unlock();
Which is equivalent to the Java manner of synchronized(myMutex) { /* do stuff here */ }

You may have thought about using the excellent Threadweaver from kdelibs to speed up your application a bit, but got scared of the horror stories of multithreading in C++.

One of the things we wanted to do in KOffice is to use Krita when printing images from KWord. The reason for this are a couple, but the most important being that we want to have just one way to do printing of images and not waste time maintaining a more than one.
Naturally the option to let Krita convert the images to CMYK while printing (as soon as QPrinter supports that) sounds like a nice to have as well.

Some weeks ago KOffice alpha1 got tagged; but some balls were dropped and it never was uploaded to the ftp site. The good news is that even more new cool stuff is visible in the KOffice Alpha2 which will probably come out end of August.

The last couple of days [1] I've been working on bi-directional text in KWord. KOffice as a whole is aimed to be used worldwide, in all sorts of environments and it has to be usable for all sorts of scripts and languages. I'm proud to tell you that the todo list on getting that done is starting to be really really small.

Here is a point wise list of things that we now do properly.