KOffice 1.6 Released

The KOffice team is proud to announce the 1.6.0 release of its office suite. This release is mostly a feature release of Krita and Kexi, but also contains major enhancements to the OpenDocument and MathML support of KFormula and new scripting functionality. This version also contains a vastly improved version of KPlato, our project planning application. Download packages for Kubuntu, SuSE or you can try before you install with the KOffice 1.6 live CD.

Krita Becomes Usable for Professional Image Work
 Krita and its maintainer Boudewijn Rempt won the aKademy Award for "Best Application" at this year's KDE conference in Dublin. With features such as magnetic selection, effect layers, colour model independence and full scriptability, it has risen to become what is probably the best free image editing program today.

Lots of New Features in Kexi
 Kexi, the desktop database application competing with MS Access, is the other application in KOffice that is already the best of its kind. Kexi has received over 270 improvements since KOffice 1.5. With this release, Kexi gains such features as the ability to handle images, compact the database, automatic datatype recognition and Kross scripting tools.

KFormula Implements OpenDocument and MathML
 The formula editor of KOffice now supports OpenDocument and MathML and uses it as its default file format. It also surpasses the equivalent component in OpenOffice.org, scoring 70% on the W3C MathML test suite compared to 22% for OpenOffice.org Formula. We see this as one example where the work to provide a very well-structured codebase of KOffice pays off to create a superior support for the existing standard.

Scripting Support in KSpread, Krita and Kexi
 KOffice 1.6 brings scripting to a new level with scripting functionality in KSpread, Krita and Kexi. Scripting is provided through the cross-language script bridge Kross, which enables KOffice to be scripted in Python and Ruby with possible future extensions through Javascript and Java. With this release, KOffice also introduces command-line scripting where, for example, spreadsheet documents can be automatically manipulated with scripts to create many new usecases.