Hi.

I know it's been talked about a lot, but I guess why not to keep the topic active as it's the most important thing in means of usability of KOffice

So I'm using OpenSuse 11.2 and OOo 3.1 on daily basis. I've always (for at least 5 years) kept an eye on KOffice as I tend to prefer KDE apps for their speed, unity and innovation, so I once in a while try to switch to KOffice. Currently I have KOffice 2.1 installed.

Almost always the try fails because of the same old issue about compatibility with OOo documents. Yesterday I opened an .odt created with OOo 3.1.1 in KOffice, but the problems I saw were:

• line break (shift+enter) is ignored
• table of contents is missing
• footer is missing (there are 2 separate footers: 1st for first page (that is shown) and 2nd for the rest of the document)
• alignment of bulleted lists is ignored for some lists
• alignment of bulleted sub-lists is ignored always
• headers' continuity is broken - there are many headers shown as ".1", ".0.1", ".0.0.1" etc.
• tables that are split in half because of pages are somewhat broken in the split-point
• tables' numbers are missing
• links inside document are formatted wrong (they are all in italics, but they shouldn't be) and I'm not sure they work (I can't find a way to edit or test them)
• illustrations are missing (the caption of these is situated at left (outside the document's border) and is written vertically)

I've read that KOffice devs made an enormous effort in bettering ODF format in 2.0 and 2.1, but there's still a long way to go, right? I really hope KOffice gets there with 2.2 (as you refer to it as a first "production release" in 2.x series), but I'm really skeptical about it considering the amount of incompatibilities listed above.

So what level of compatibility can we expect in 2.2? Is there any hope that issues above will no more exist in 2.2?

Hi atrox,

Yes, KOffice has made big leaps in compatibility and features over 2.0 and 2.1. And yes, there is still a long way to go until we reach full compatibility.

Now, compatibility comes in two flavors:

• Feature parity. If you don't support the same features, you can never have full compatibility. One example of this is that KOffice 2.1 doesn't support the feature Table of Contents. It cannot load, render or save a table of content, just some parts of the text.
• Bug free implementation (or bug parity). If you can read and save each others files, we have compatibility.

In general, the second point is more important for us than the first. It's more important that we have interoperability and good usability for the features that we do support than to have many features. In the long run, the features will come.

With that background, I'm going to try to answer your issues in more detail:

* line break (shift+enter) is ignored

I'm not sure if you mean that KWord doesn't read and honor line breaks in the file, or that it cannot generate them using shift+enter. If it's the first one, it's a bug that has to be fixed. If it's the second, I guess it would be convenient to have and should probably be fixed as well.

* table of contents is missing

This is a missing feature. We are working on it for 2.2. You can see the first version of a patch at http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/2410/.

* footer is missing (there are 2 separate footers: 1st for first page (that is shown) and 2nd for the rest of the document)

This is also a missing feature that we are working on. There are already a lot of enhancements for both headers and footers in the code that will become 2.2, and you can find some of it at the review board.

* alignment of bulleted lists is ignored for some lists
* alignment of bulleted sub-lists is ignored always
* headers' continuity is broken - there are many headers shown as ".1", ".0.1", ".0.0.1" etc.

These are definitive bugs, and we would be very grateful for bug report(s) with a test document. If you want to help us, go to bugs.kde.org and create a couple of bug reports there.

* tables that are split in half because of pages are somewhat broken in the split-point

Yes, we are aware of the problem. A rudimentary table implementation was included in 2.1, more or less as a view-only feature. It will be improved for 2.2 and we will add functionality to edit the tables themselves.

* tables' numbers are missing

I'm not really sure what you mean here. Can you explain?

* links inside document are formatted wrong (they are all in italics, but they shouldn't be) and I'm not sure they work (I can't find a way to edit or test them)

The formatting issue is a bug that we should fix. To edit links is a new feature that we also should fix.

* illustrations are missing (the caption of these is situated at left (outside the document's border) and is written vertically)

I'm not sure what you mean when you say illustrations are missing. But if captions are positioned wrong, that's a bug that we have to fix.

Now, I'm sure you are disappointed that KOffice doesn't work for you. But interactions such as this one is what makes it better. (And remember that we didn't label KOffice 2.1 as ready for production use.) I'm thankful that you took the time to point out the issues, and it would be even more helpful if you would take the time to register the bugs in the bug tracker.

To answer your last question: "What level of compatibility can we expect for 2.2?" I can't give you any guarantees, but there are several people working full time to improve KOffice (among them myself), and the community is determined that 2.2 will be the version that we can recommend for end users. This doesn't mean that everything will be perfect. There will still exist bugs, but above that, there will exist features that OOo has that are not supported by KOffice. The bugs that you point out above should be possible to solve all of them if the developers are made aware of them.

ingwa wrote:

* line break (shift+enter) is ignored

I'm not sure if you mean that KWord doesn't read and honor line breaks in the file, or that it cannot generate them using shift+enter. If it's the first one, it's a bug that has to be fixed. If it's the second, I guess it would be convenient to have and should probably be fixed as well.

I meant that KWord handled the line break as paragraph break. The issue is with my first page where paragraph is set to have ~10 inches before paragraph, but line-break makes it possible to still write multiple lines within the same paragraph. KOffice showed these lines as separate paragraphs.

ingwa wrote:

* alignment of bulleted lists is ignored for some lists
* alignment of bulleted sub-lists is ignored always
* headers' continuity is broken - there are many headers shown as ".1", ".0.1", ".0.0.1" etc.

These are definitive bugs, and we would be very grateful for bug report(s) with a test document. If you want to help us, go to bugs.kde.org and create a couple of bug reports there.

Well, I guess test-documents are a weak point of reporting bugs of office software, because usually people don't want to publish documents containing private data. But without the certain documents it's very difficult to degub the issues. Is there any help of the bug reports without the document?

ingwa wrote:

* tables' numbers are missing

I'm not really sure what you mean here. Can you explain?

Yes, sry. I meant numbers in tables' captions, eg. "Table 2: ..."

ingwa wrote:

* illustrations are missing (the caption of these is situated at left (outside the document's border) and is written vertically)

I'm not sure what you mean when you say illustrations are missing. But if captions are positioned wrong, that's a bug that we have to fix.

I meant that illustrations are missing Ie. the frame for them is there (with a weirdly situated caption), but illustration itself is not.

ingwa wrote:Now, I'm sure you are disappointed that KOffice doesn't work for you. But interactions such as this one is what makes it better. (And remember that we didn't label KOffice 2.1 as ready for production use.) I'm thankful that you took the time to point out the issues, and it would be even more helpful if you would take the time to register the bugs in the bug tracker.

I've become very patient about open-source software and I totally admire people who are putting their free time into these projects. I'm sure I'll just keep trying KOffice, even if it won't be totally satisfactory by 2.2, 2.3 or what ever version there will be.. it just seems a really great project with a really big potential

atrox wrote:

ingwa wrote:

* line break (shift+enter) is ignored

I'm not sure if you mean that KWord doesn't read and honor line breaks in the file, or that it cannot generate them using shift+enter. If it's the first one, it's a bug that has to be fixed. If it's the second, I guess it would be convenient to have and should probably be fixed as well.

I meant that KWord handled the line break as paragraph break. The issue is with my first page where paragraph is set to have ~10 inches before paragraph, but line-break makes it possible to still write multiple lines within the same paragraph. KOffice showed these lines as separate paragraphs.

Ok. That's a bug that has to be fixed.

atrox wrote:

ingwa wrote:

* alignment of bulleted lists is ignored for some lists
* alignment of bulleted sub-lists is ignored always
* headers' continuity is broken - there are many headers shown as ".1", ".0.1", ".0.0.1" etc.

These are definitive bugs, and we would be very grateful for bug report(s) with a test document. If you want to help us, go to bugs.kde.org and create a couple of bug reports there.

Well, I guess test-documents are a weak point of reporting bugs of office software, because usually people don't want to publish documents containing private data. But without the certain documents it's very difficult to degub the issues. Is there any help of the bug reports without the document?

Yes, there is, but it's going to be a much faster process if you include a test document. Note that the document doesn't have to have real data in it. If it's not too difficult to isolate the bug by providing a very small document with just the part of the text that shows the bug, then that is even better. And the text itself is irrelevant since this bug was about numbering. It should be possible to illustrate with just 3-5 paragraphs if it is what I think.

atrox wrote:

ingwa wrote:

* illustrations are missing (the caption of these is situated at left (outside the document's border) and is written vertically)

I'm not sure what you mean when you say illustrations are missing. But if captions are positioned wrong, that's a bug that we have to fix.

I meant that illustrations are missing Ie. the frame for them is there (with a weirdly situated caption), but illustration itself is not.

Hmm, a test document would be greate here as well. Image handling has seen some improvements for 2.2, but this bug may still be present. Also, the caption problem has to be fixed.

Another possibility is that the illustration is simply in an unsupported file format. Do you happen to know what format the illustration is in? 2.2 has added support for vector formats like wmf and emf that isn't in 2.1.

atrox wrote:

ingwa wrote:Now, I'm sure you are disappointed that KOffice doesn't work for you. But interactions such as this one is what makes it better. (And remember that we didn't label KOffice 2.1 as ready for production use.) I'm thankful that you took the time to point out the issues, and it would be even more helpful if you would take the time to register the bugs in the bug tracker.

I've become very patient about open-source software and I totally admire people who are putting their free time into these projects. I'm sure I'll just keep trying KOffice, even if it won't be totally satisfactory by 2.2, 2.3 or what ever version there will be.. it just seems a really great project with a really big potential

Yes, that's what we think as well.

ingwa wrote:

atrox wrote:Well, I guess test-documents are a weak point of reporting bugs of office software, because usually people don't want to publish documents containing private data. But without the certain documents it's very difficult to degub the issues. Is there any help of the bug reports without the document?

Yes, there is, but it's going to be a much faster process if you include a test document. Note that the document doesn't have to have real data in it. If it's not too difficult to isolate the bug by providing a very small document with just the part of the text that shows the bug, then that is even better. And the text itself is irrelevant since this bug was about numbering. It should be possible to illustrate with just 3-5 paragraphs if it is what I think.

OK, I'll see what I can do about it

ingwa wrote:

atrox wrote:I meant that illustrations are missing Ie. the frame for them is there (with a weirdly situated caption), but illustration itself is not.

Hmm, a test document would be greate here as well. Image handling has seen some improvements for 2.2, but this bug may still be present. Also, the caption problem has to be fixed.

Another possibility is that the illustration is simply in an unsupported file format. Do you happen to know what format the illustration is in? 2.2 has added support for vector formats like wmf and emf that isn't in 2.1.

I found out that the images are in a PDF documents, but I don't have any idea what's the image format in these. I know that at least OOo, Gimp and Krita are able to open them.

I found out that the images are in a PDF documents, but I don't have any idea what's the image format in these. I know that at least OOo, Gimp and Krita are able to open them.

There you go, then. KWord can't show embedded PDF's right now. Some applications (like Krita that you mention), can import them, but that's not the same.

If it's any comfort to you, it's on the TODO list, but I don't think it will happen for 2.2.

So, there you go

[*] line break (shift+enter) is ignored

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220693

[*] alignment of bulleted sub-lists is ignored always

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220697

[*] headers' continuity is broken - there are many headers shown as ".1", ".0.1", ".0.0.1" etc.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220699

[*] tables' numbers are missing

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220700

[*] links inside document are formatted wrong (they are all in italics, but they shouldn't be) and I'm not sure they work (I can't find a way to edit or test them)

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220701

Thank you very much.

Hi all. I was going to open a new thread, but I found this one I think can be fine as well.
I've tried KOffice several times during years (I've used kde for a long, long time... at least for me. Since 3.0 I think. Always used KDE as my DE of choice, tried all the others but never got acquainted. KDE is just perfect for me, I suppose... I really love it! But I think I should stop talking about me... ) but never got to use it as my default office suite, mainly for compatibility issues with both odf and ms-office documents (I need to share things all the time, interoperability of my data is a must for me).

I've heard very good things about KOffice 2.3 beta though, so even if I know it is not yet ready for "prime time", I thought it was worth to try it out and see it by myself. It is leaps ahead of what it was the last time I gave it a look, but still not ready for me, sadly. There's a lot of good promises though, and I'd really like to switch to KOffice sometime in the near future (given also the obscure future of OOo/LibreOffice, and the regrowing gap between it and ms-office in terms of interface usability and features, when only a few years ago they were almost on par on that, at least for the use I make of an office suite, which is indeed quite basic. But I continue to digress).

I faced two main problems: the first, and most off-topic one, is that the UI takes too much vertical space on my Dell Mini 1012 (1024*600 screen, which is... not very big, to use an euphemism), and goes off with its lower part, making unreachable to my mouse all the controls on the bottom of the window, and the lower part of the large sidebar to the right. Since netbook and small devices in general are greatly growing in diffusion, that's something to keep in count, I think.

The second problem, which is perfectly in topic this time, is the same as the topic starter's one: relevant incompatibility with ODF. In my personal experience: inability to open password-protected ODTs; inability to open old versions of a text (the ones reachable by File-Versions). They are all correctly listed, but I can't open them: it asks me to choose an import filter and then tells me it's not an ODT document (which it is) and to choose an appropriate filter. Lastly, but most importantly for me, there is a huge problem in correctly rendering an odp presentation in kpresenter. The one in particular I had problems with is a very simple one, containing mainly white text over a black background and a couple of images I cropped using the internal ooimpress tool (similar, but much more clunky to what ms-powerpoint does). In KPresenter, all the white text is rendered in black (I thought it was disappeared completely, but when I selected a whole slide I saw it was there, only black on black and hence invisible), and the cropped images where rendered of the same shape of the crop, but in their entirety (i.e. all the parts I cropped out where visible) and stretched to fit the shape the image had after I cropped it.

I'm not very experienced in signaling bugs, so before opening them on bugs.kde.org I thought to share what I experienced and discuss about it a little bit. I'm no programmer at all, nor a UI designer or anything, but if I can do something to help at least by signaling bugs and helping sorting things out, I'd love to make my part

All these things aside, I hope KOffice grows to maturity soon, and I'll eagerly wait for it to happen!

P.S.
Sorry if my English is not completely comprehensible, my main language is Italian