The KOffice team announces
the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With
KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development
is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had
trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much
increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored
Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice
Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work.















Using editable rich text (e.g. in Krita) is now possible.Apart from much invisible, but very important work on improving core
funcationality like ODF support, text handling and other infrastructure,
important visible areas of progress in Alpha 9 are:

KSpread has regained support for printing. It is possible to print
a range of sheets or a selection of cells.

The Kexi report generator can now generate reports in html and ODS,
the OpenDocument spreadsheet file format, which KSpread and OpenOffice
Calc can read.

Vector layers in Krita can contain text and vector shapes. Editable,
rich text in Krita is now a reality. Even nicer, it has become possible
to add filter layers and masks to Krita, delivering live filter effects
on vector shapes.

The text shape object, which is the basis for KWord and provides
editable rich text in all KOffice applications has gained a visual way
of changing the paragraph layout.

KOffice-wide, a new implementation of guides provides snapping to
guides and dragging of guides for all flake shape objects.



New for text: visually alter your paragraph spacing.


The Google Summer of Code students have been hard at work: Lukas Tvrdy
has implemented the core of a chinese painting brush engine. Benjamin
Cail has ported most of the .doc import filter to make it convert to odf
instead of the old native KWord file format, cleaning up and improving
our ODF code along the way. ODF support is really being focussed upon
with both Piere Ducroquet and Carlos Manuel Licea V