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KOffice 1.1 Release Announcement

Tuesday, 28 August 2001


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

KDE's Free, Integrated Office Suite Available for GNU/Linux - Unix

Leading GNU/Linux Desktop Ships Free Stable Release of KOffice

The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.1. KOffice is a free, integrated office suite for KDE which utilizes open standards for component communication and component embedding. KOffice 1.1 constitutes the most stable and feature-complete release of KOffice to date. The KOffice team encourages all users of earlier KOffice releases to upgrade to KOffice 1.1.

"KOffice is undergoing rapid development and its future looks very bright," stated Eugene Clement, Product Manager for Mandrakesoft. "Currently KOffice has functionality well-suited for home and SOHO users, who generally write letters, faxes, memos and similar documents. As the import filters for proprietary document formats continue to improve and the suite's features continue to evolve, we expect that in the near future KOffice will be ready to meet the needs of all but the most demanding areas of the enterprise."

"With this release the KOffice team has delivered a very stable and complete office package," said KDE and SuSE developer Waldo Bastian. "KOffice takes full advantage of the new printing support offered by KDE 2.2. For example, each KOffice component allows you to email your documents in the PDF format to your colleagues, or simply to fax them. KOffice is tightly integrated with the rest of KDE, which makes it friendly on system resources. And thanks to the powerful KParts component technology, it is very flexible and extensible."

This release includes the following components: KWord (a frame-based, full-featured word processor); KPresenter (a presentation application); KSpread (a spreadsheet application); Kontour (a vector-drawing application); Kivio (a flowchart application); KChart (a chart drawing application); KFormula (a formula editor); and filters (for importing documents created by, or exporting documents for use with, other office suites or office programs).

KOffice and all its components are available for free under Open Source licenses from the KDE server and its mirrors. As a result of the dedicated efforts of hundreds of translators, KOffice 1.1 is available in 28 languages.

More information about KOffice, including Release Notes, a list of changes since the KOffice 1.0 release, and a KOffice FAQ, are available at the KOffice website.

Index

Installing Binary Packages

Binary Packages. Some distributors choose to provide binary packages of KOffice for certain versions of their distribution. Some of these binary packages for KOffice 1.1 will be available for free download under http://download.kde.org/stable/koffice-1.1/ or under the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp server mirrors. Please note that the KDE team is not responsible for these packages as they are provided by third parties -- typically, but not always, the distributor of the relevant distribution (if you cannot find a binary package for your distribution, please read the KDE Binary Package Policy).

Library Requirements. The library requirements for a particular binary package varies with the system on which the package was compiled. Please bear in mind that some binary packages may require a newer version of Qt and/or KDE than was distributed with the distribution version for which the binary package is listed below. For general library requirements for KOffice, please see the text at Source Code - Library Requirements.

Package Locations. At the time of this release, pre-compiled packages are available for:

Please check the servers periodically for pre-compiled packages for other distributions. More binary packages may become available over the coming days and weeks; in particular, RedHat packages are expected tomorrow and Debian packages are expected late this or early next week.

#### Downloading and Compiling KOffice

Source Packages. The source packages for KOffice 1.1 are available for free download at http://download.kde.org/stable/koffice-1.1/src/ or in the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp server mirrors.

Library Requirements. KOffice requires recent versions of Qt and kdelibs, and even more recent versions are recommended.

KOffice 1.1 will not work with versions of Qt older than 2.2.4 or versions of kdelibs older than 2.1.1.

Compiler Requirements. Please note that some components of KOffice 1.1 (such as the Quattro Pro® import filter and the new KChart) will not compile with older versions of gcc/egcs, such as egcs-1.1.2 or gcc-2.7.2. At a minimum gcc-2.95-* is required.

Further Instructions. For further instructions on compiling and installing KOffice, please consult the installation instructions.

Application Descriptions

In addition to the features described below for each application, each KOffice applications provides embedding of other KOffice documents/components (e.g., a spreadsheet can be embedded in a word processing document and accessed/edited from inside KWord), a modern print dialog (including numerous predefined page sizes, configurable margins, etc.) and print preview, import of images and clip-art (.wmf format), scanning support and scripting via KDE's DCOP mechanism.

KWord

KWord is a FrameMaker-like word-processing and desktop publishing application. KWord's features include:

More information about KWord features, as well as many screenshots, are available at the KWord website.

KPresenter

KPresenter is a presentation application. Its features include:

More information about KPresenter, including some screenshots, is available at the KPresenter website.

KSpread

KSpread is a scriptable spreadsheet program which provides both table-oriented sheets and support for complex mathematical formulas and statistics. KSpread features include:

More information about KSpread, including some screenshots, is available at the KSpread website.

Kontour

Kontour is a vector drawing program which aims to provide similar functionality to Corel DrawTM or Adobe IllustratorTM. Kontour's features currently include:

More information about Kontour, including some screenshots, is available at the Kontour website.

Kivio

Kivio is a flowcharting program which offers advanced flowcharting abilities. Objects are scriptable, and a backend plugin system will provide objects with unlimited abilities. For example, an object could convert a directory of C++ header files and into a graphical class map, or an object could explore and map out a specified network. The selected scripting language chosen is Python, though knowledge of Python or programming is not required to use Kivio. Kivio's features include:

More information about Kivio, including a tutorial, screenshots, and information on obtaining additional stencils, is available at the Kivio website.

KChart

KChart is a chart drawing application which can be used to embed charts into your KOffice documents, such as a report written with KWord. Besides providing the usual charting capabilities, KChart is both easy to use and highly configurable. It provides:

More information about KChart, including some screenshots, is available at the KChart website.

KFormula

KFormula is an easy-to-use formula editor which provides basic input facilities and support functionality. Features include:

More information about KFormula, including some screenshots, is available at the KFormula website.

KOffice filters

KOffice includes a number of filters for importing MS Office and Corel Office documents as well as documents in other formats. The current status of these filters is available at the KOffice filters website.

About KOffice/KDE

KOffice is part of the KDE project. KDE is an independent, collaborative project by hundreds of developers worldwide to create a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop environment employing a component-based, network-transparent architecture. KDE is working proof of the power of the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software development model to create first-rate technologies on par with and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

For more information about KDE, please visit KDE's web site. For more information about KOffice, please visit KOffice's web site where you can find, among other things, information on contributing to KOffice.

Corporate KOffice Sponsors

Besides the valuable and excellent efforts by the KOffice developers themselves, significant support for KOffice development has been provided by MandrakeSoft (which sponsors KOffice developers David Faure and Laurent Montel), theKompany.com (which contributed Kivio to KOffice), and Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB (which contributed the new KChart to KOffice). Thanks!


Trademarks Notices. KDE, K Desktop Environment, KChart, KFormula, Kontour, KOffice, KPresenter, Krayon, KSpread and KWord are trademarks of KDE e.V. Kivio is a trademark of theKompany.com. PostScript is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Quattro Pro is a registered trademark of Corel Corporation or Corel Corporation Limited. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Unix is a registered trademark of The Open Group. Trolltech and Qt are trademarks of Trolltech AS. All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contacts:
United States:Eunice Kim
The Terpin Group

ekim@terpin.com
(1) 650 344 4944 ext. 105
 
Kurt Granroth

granroth@kde.org
(1) 480 732 1752
 
Andreas Pour
pour@kde.org
(1) 718-456-1165

Europe (French and English):David Faure

faure@kde.org
(44) 1225 837409

Europe (English and German):Ralf Nolden

nolden@kde.org
(49) 2421 502758