KOffice 2.1 arrives

The KOffice development team have announced the release of version 2.1 of their open source office suite. KOffice is composed of the KWord word processor, KSpread spread sheet, KPresenter presentation manager, KPlato project management, Karbon vector graphics editor and Krita, a raster graphics editor. The latest release includes a number of bug fixes, "general improvements in the maturity of the individual application" and new features.

In addition to overhauling document import, KOffice 2.1 features a number of improvements to the underlying libraries, native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) and KWord has a new implementation of tables which is more advanced than the version 1.6 implementation. KWord now supports colour coded change tracking. Insertions, deletions and formatting changes, for example, have different colours. KPlato now includes support for many different manipulations of resources, currencies and work types and also has support for offline work using a small utility called KPlatoWork. Other notable improvements include updates to Karbon and Krita, and a more "unified look and feel" across all of the applications.

The developers also note that while "most applications and components have improved significantly", the 2.1 release "should still only be used by early adopters and probably not as the primary worktool". According to the release announcement, "It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet".

More details about the release can be found in the release announcement. However the change log for the 2.1 release has yet to be posted on the project's web site. Packaged binary versions of KOffice 2.1 are available to download and is licensed under LGPL 2+ and under the GPL.

(crve)