First stable release of the Calligra office and productivity suite

The Calligra project, part of the KDE community, has announced the first stable release, version 2.4.0, of its set of open source office and productivity applications. Referred to as "a continuation of the KOffice project" by its developers, Calligra has been in development for two years, and is available as a desktop version called the Calligra Suite that includes office, graphics and project management applications, as well as mobile versions for supported smartphones and tablets.

The Krita image editing app, part of the Calligra Suite
Source: Calligra The desktop suite features a word processor called Words, a presentation program called Stage and a spreadsheet application named Sheets, which used to be known as Tables. Project management applications include Kexi, a database app, and a project planning app simply called Plan, as well as Flow for diagrams and flowcharts, and Braindump for note taking. Karbon, a vector graphics drawing app, and a painting and image editing app called Krita are also included. "It's the most comprehensive free suite of applications anywhere and we expect the number of applications to grow as the project matures," said KDE developer Inge Wallin.

Mobile platforms are also supported: Calligra Mobile is a version for the Nokia N900 internet tablet and smartphone and is both a viewer and editor that supports text documents, spreadsheets and presentations; Calligra Active includes a more modern user interface for the KDE Plasma-Active tablet environment, though it currently only supports viewing files.

Calligra Words in action
Source: Calligra Calligra has a "completely rewritten" text layout engine, a simplified user interface and can handle more parts of the Open Document Format (ODF) than KOffice. Other changes include improved import filters for Microsoft document formats, better style handling and roundtripping of advanced documents, as well as various bug fixes.

Further information about the project's first stable release can be found in the official release announcement and on the "Tour of the Calligra Suite" page. Calligra 2.4 is available to download as GPLv2-licensed source code and binary packages for various operating systems and distributions; at the time of writing, the project's Get Calligra download page has yet to be updated to reflect the new version.

See also:

• History making the first release of Calligra, a KDE blog post.
• KDE: KOffice becomes the Calligra Suite, a report from The H.

(crve)