Hi,

I'd like give KOffice a try but I strand almost immediately when trying to open my existing odt files from OOo.

The formatting of the documents completely wrong and bear no resemblance at all to how they get rendered in OOo. For example, one of the documents is a flyer, with two copies of the flyer per page. The document is two pages long in total. In KWord there is only one page, with only 3 lines of the table displayed at the top - the rest of the page is blank.

I have to add that the documents contain a fair amount of tables, however I thought the whole point of the Open Document format was that all documents can be opened and displayed as intended, regardless of the application used to open them.

I have just managed to get a few people to switch to OOo/Neo Office and ODF, explaining to them that the fact that Word documents won't necessarily render correctly due to the fact that it's a proprietary standard, and that ODF will avoid that problem.
Now I'm concerned that any documents I create in KWord/KOffice will not render correctly when I send them to users of OOo, Neo Office and other applications supporting ODF.

Any ideas as to what might be going on here? Should I report a bug?

Thanks
Emile

Hi,
Yes it would be nice if you reports this to bugs.kde.org, with an exemple of a file which wrongly loaded.

It's a known fact that tables aren't finished in KWord yet, which is one of the biggest reasons it's not recommended for everyday use yet.

Madman wrote:It's a known fact that tables aren't finished in KWord yet, which is one of the biggest reasons it's not recommended for everyday use yet.

That's true, but progress is being made very quickly (estan's blog), so don't despair!

It's all right for ME, I don't like tables very much at all... although, if you make a flake table shape then I suppose I won't suffer the difficulties I do with, "typical" tables...

But yeah. I've been using KOffice for a good while now and I really think it is a vast improvement over rivals, especially in terms of performance and content handling.

Before talking about "competition" (??), the first step is to make open standard applications inter-operable !!
How do you want to spread "open standards" if OOo documents are not compatible with Koffice documents.
This is a nonsense which highlights the fact there is no real standard.

A very serious compatibility test should be put in place in order to identify what is standard compliant and what is not.
To be clear, it is a complete mess today, with very poor visibility, which does not help for confidence.

What should be used today ? OOo ? Koffice 1.6 ? 2.0 ?
Which one garanties that a document I create today will not be lost tomorrow because not standard compliant ?

I also have personal experiences with very simple documents created with OOo which are not Koffice compliant.

To MrE:

You don't indicate which version of KOffice that you tried, so I'll assume that it is 2.0. And yes, 2.0 does contain lots of bugs, incompatibilities and unfinished features. It was mostly released to allow developers to download it and start from a well-defined platform. It was specifically *not* recommended to end users such as yourself doing production work. That was very clearly stated in the release notes.

Now, I understand that you may not have read the release notes and didn't know this. So it's not your fault. Perhaps we, the KOffice developers, should have added a splash screen where we made this more clear.

The purpose of OpenDocument is indeed to ensure interoperability, and this is something we take very seriously. In the case of KOffice 2.0, the incompatibilities that exist are due to bugs and not yet implemented features.

I think you will find 2.1 very much better in this regard. We will still not recommend 2.1 for all end users, but mostly for early adopters and people who have limited needs. 2.2 will be our first "consumer product".

To L_V:

I agree that a serious compatibility test should be performed. And it is -- continuously. A very nice site called officeshots.org is being developed for exactly this purpose. We are looking at setting up a backend server for officeshots for koffice, and it will be done around the release of 2.1 at the latest.

Today we recommend you to use OpenOffice.org for production work as an end user. After KOffice 2.1 is released, we recommend you to take a look at it, try it out and report all bugs and incompatibilities. After 2.2 is released, we will most likely recommend that for most KDE users and why not Gnome users as well?

Finally, to say that "there is no real standard" is simply false, and is talk worthy of ODF enemies. I don't think I need to mention any names, they are well known anyway.

"Finally, to say that "there is no real standard" is simply false,"

I am talking about facts per now.
Good to know it takes the good direction although a bit late because it takes time to create trust, which is not there today.
There is absolutely no clear communication and advice to people who intends to use open standards.
The worse experience is when users just discover that open standard documents are not compatible at all.
If only OOo should be used, waiting for Koffice 2.2, it should be communicated somewhere, and not on this very restricted forum only.

I would clearly prefer Koffice, and now I know I will have to wait about one year from now to expect something which can be spread in distributions, with no serious compatibility problems.
Thanks !

I am talking about facts per now.
Good to know it takes the good direction although a bit late because it takes time to create trust, which is not there today.

Well, if you limit yourself to OOo and KOffice, then you may actually be right. KOffice has had a long and tough ride during the last few year. First there was the switch from the native file formats to ODF, then immediately after that it was the switch from Qt3/KDE3 to Qt4/KDE4. Before 2.0 there was a loooong time without a new release, and even before that our ODF implementation wasn't really high quality.

The good news is that since 2.0 came out, the development has gone with record speed. 2.1 will have a lot of nice features that weren't in 2.0 (text table among other things -- that's a much bigger feature than it looks on the surface), and the overall quality will be much higher as well.

There is absolutely no clear communication and advice to people who intends to use open standards.

That's true in a way too. We have just switched website to something that should be easier for non-developers to handle, using a CMS. Before that we were using subversion and hand hacked php code.

We will try to communicate more and make a better job of telling our goals and the current state. I think we were very clear in the 2.0 release announcement, but that's not something we can expect everybody to read.

The worse experience is when users just discover that open standard documents are not compatible at all.
If only OOo should be used, waiting for Koffice 2.2, it should be communicated somewhere, and not on this very restricted forum only.

Yes. When the user finds out it doesn't work, that's bad. One precaution we have taken is to explicitly talk with the packagers in the Linux distributions and told them only to package KOffice 2.0 in their experimental repositories or similar. I think in OpenSUSE, you even have to enable that repository manually.

I would clearly prefer Koffice, and now I know I will have to wait about one year from now to expect something which can be spread in distributions, with no serious compatibility problems.

Half a year, actually. We are not far from the release of KOffice 2.1 (october). At that point, unless something extraordinary happens, we will recommend it to early adopters. After that 2.2 is half a year away unless we decide to resync our schedules with the rest of KDE.

Thanks !

And thank you for your support. I hope we don't disappoint you too much.

I hope we don't disappoint you too much.

It is not a personal problem.
It's hard to promote open standards if after 2 minutes testing you demonstrate that different tools are not open standard compliant, or that the standard is too fuzzy to be applicable, then that this "standard" will never exist, or if each team wants to make his own standard....

Let's see within 6 months or 1 year if this standard really exists or not.

Have you tried opening OpenOffice documents in other ODF applications? Abiword, GNU spread etc.?

No. Just testing OOo and Koffice was enough for me to highlight the compatibility problem.
Compatibility with OOo is the most important, because also used on windows platform.

I disagree. Using an office suite that is far from complete and announced as such isn't a reliable test for ODF standards compatibility between applications.

The fact is you can use OOo on KDE/Gnome/windows platforms.
The fact is you cannot yet use Koffice, especially on KDE4.

This makes a huge difference.

Not really true. You *can* use it, though it's not yet feature complete. Whether you do so is entirely your choice, and for me, that choice is important. In fact I prefer to have both installed, and use both, for different tasks/purposes.