Hi, everyone.

This is another issue I've been wondering about for some time: While KOffice seems promising, what kind of hoops would one theoretically need to jump through to create a Qt4/KDE frontend for OpenOffice.org? It's just one of those apps that I truly love, but it doesn't quite integrate into the KDE desktop very well, visually or function-wise.

I was just curious.

If it is, how doable would it be to give OO.O a major redesign with enough visual glamor to make them comparable to say, Office 2007 or iWork '08? Would one need to heavily rewrite many of the functions, or is it a matter of simply replacing the visual shell?

on most distributions, like suse, openoffice already uses a Qt3 frontend. I guess it will be a matter of time before it is ported to Qt4

I believe it's more of a theme than a full-blown frontend, with hooks for the KDE file dialog.

As far as I remember, OO.o uses a graphical layer called the VCL (which happens to have the same name as the Borland one...). It does not use any KDE library directly.

And yes, it would be great to have OpenOffice fully ported to Qt/KDE libs, without the VCL layer.

Indeed, so what you are asking is to replace the toolkit used by OpenOffice for Qt4. That would be a task similar to rewriting most of openoffice.

Considering some stuff in OOo is > 20 years old, that might not be a bad idea

> 20 years?
that's not too much?
yah, openoffice in Qt4 will boost the speed on the graphics side, and could also remove the java that they use.
but I think that asking this on the kde forum is not the right place, should try with the openoffice devs. ( or get the source, change everything and try to make them accept the patches )

Tomaz wrote:> 20 years?
that's not too much?

Slightly
The thing is, StarOffice (the thing Openoffice was made of) was created 1984 and a lot of the core components are difficult to change, so there are really parts which are that old.

Tomaz wrote:yah, openoffice in Qt4 will boost the speed on the graphics side, and could also remove the java that they use.
but I think that asking this on the kde forum is not the right place, should try with the openoffice devs. ( or get the source, change everything and try to make them accept the patches )

I doubt Sun would like dumping Java. Also don't underestimate the size of the OOo source (IIRC it is about as much as the 20 core KDE modules have = a lot).
But getting in touch with the openoffice devs is the way to go

Still it's a fairly good idea to considerate. As we now have OOo 3.0, the interface is built of Aqua widgets for OSX and I've heard they have also more Vista specific things in it.

It seems to be the UI can be differentiated, so a more Qt4 compatible look is possible. Though you cannot fully replace all non-Qt elements by Qt widgets, I think the programmers can do a lot more than the look 'n feel at this moment.

Openoffice already does that with kde3 on most systems: it replaces its widgets with Qt-widgets, uses Qt/KDE dialogs, etc.
So in time, i expect them to switch to Qt4.
But all of that is done through an extra layer above the original OOO.o widgets, the toolkit itself isn't replaced by Qt..

Nah, I don't think that rewriting part/whole app just for better apearance would be an useful effort. Instead I expect Koffice to improve. Latest betas look realy promising, and I hope that it will become an equal competitor to OO soon.

I don't think it will be "soon"... They dramatically lack developers, and even though many people would like to see KOffice on par with OOo or MSOffice, not that many of them are ready to get involved into the development process.