Calligra plans new professional writing program

The Calligra development team has announced that it plans to add a new program called "Author" to the Calligra Suite, its collection of open source office and productivity applications. The developers say that Calligra Author will be a writing tool aimed at professional authors and will support the process of creating a new book from conception to its final publication.

According to developer Inge Wallin, who started the project, the new program will focus on two types of users: novelists who write long texts, and textbook authors who "want to take advantage of the added possibilities in eBooks compared to paper-based textbooks". For the first category, the application will provide tools for the different phases of the creative process including synopsis, writing, reviewing, polishing and publishing. For textbooks, Calligra Author will have various interactive content elements including multimedia, 2D and 3D animations, and support for scripting with JavaScript and embedding content from the web. Wallin says that Author will also take advantage of other Calligra Suite application. He hopes that it will become, for authors, what the Krita image editing application is for painters.

Since announcing the start of the project, Wallin has published a progress update to his blog that includes a roadmap with requested features. So far, the team has published the initial Author code for review, and created a bugzilla page, mailing list and special user forum for feedback and suggestions. Currently in development, the first version of Calligra Author – including full documentation in both eBook and Wiki formats – will be released with version 2.6 of the Calligra Suite in late 2012.

See also:

• Calligra 2.5 released, a report from The H.

(crve)