Calligra 2.5 released [LWN.net]

Version 2.5 of the Calligra suite has been announced. "For the productivity part of the suite (word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program) the target user of version 2.5 is still the student or academic user. This version has a number of new features that will make it more suitable for these users." Additions include a table editor, a number of spreadsheet improvements, some new input filters, and more.

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Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 14:40 UTC (Mon) by cmorgan (guest, #71980) [Link] (25 responses)

Congrats! Calligra, using QT, always seemed like a cleaner approach to cross-platform support than with custom frontends like LO has. The Calligra codebase is much cleaner imo.

Do they have an option to place the properties up in the toolbar at the top, like Word and LO does, instead of on the side?

Chris

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 15:22 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (24 responses)

I thought Calligra was kdelibs-based (and non-linux kde ports are off the map those days...)

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 15:32 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (22 responses)

Yes, Calligra uses kdelibs. But I'm not sure I get your point here.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 15:44 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (21 responses)

(cmorgan)
> Calligra, using QT, always seemed like a cleaner approach to cross-platform support than with custom frontends like LO has.

(me)
> I thought Calligra was kdelibs-based (and non-linux kde ports are off the map those days...)

(boudewijn)
> Yes, Calligra uses kdelibs. But I'm not sure I get your point here.

I had not been able lately to find a good, reasonably stable kdelibs-based-software (amarok, digikam, k3b?, the whole of kde if it's not asking too much) port to Windows and OSX. Even Calligra only has ATM AFAICT a "considered very unstable" MSI installer and no OSX installer/port that I can find.

So, even if it has the potential to be "a cleaner approach to a cross-platform office suite", it's not living to that potential.

OTOH, LibreOffice3.6 is working AOK -- and consistently -- on the three platforms I use today (Kubuntu precise, W7, Mountain Lion).

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 17:03 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (20 responses)

Yeah, well, the problems with the Windows version of Calligra have very little to do with the KDE libraries and frameworks -- those are not what causes the installer to be experimental.

The reason it's experimental is that nobody in their right minds wants to develop on Windows. There is about a dozen dedicated users who test of u and report Windows-specific bugs. We've got a weird bug in the msword filter, somewhere in the wv2 library. OOo-generated .doc files load, MS-Word generated .doc files don't. But finding someone who wants to put spare time into investigating an issue like that is nearly impossible.

Building on Windows takes ages and debugging is horrible. We've got more of those bugs, sometimes causes by MSVC, sometimes by the Windows platform. I've got a bug in Krita that only happens if Krita is compiled with msvc. If I compile with Intel's icl compiler or with mingw, no bug...

People might jump up right now and claim that that's because I only have a couple of years of Windows experience compared to a decade of Linux, but if development on Windows were as easy and enjoyable as on Linux, there'd be developers joining the project. There aren't...

On the other hand, I got funding to make a touch-based version of Krita for Windows 8 now, and that really should help move at least that part of Calligra beyond the purely experimental stage.

As for OSX, well, nobody in the project has a Mac. When I had one, I regularly compiled for OSX, but that was 2007. Back then, yes, we had a problem with dbus on OSX, so that was clearly a platform issue caused by using the KDE libraries and frameworks. It's also five years ago.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 18:01 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (19 responses)

I guess then portability doesn't really matter much then.

Good luck on the Windows 8 port.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 18:28 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (18 responses)

It matters to me, because I want to reach out to users on Windows, because I think that will help create momentum so books, videos, forums, websites and so get created. The top three suggestions Google gives when typing "krita " are "krita download", "krita vs gimp" and "krita windows". There's a demand, for Krita at least, on Windows. I just need to figure out a way to get there, preferably without going mad.

It's the same problem apps like gimp have, of course. Gimp has many, many more users on Windows than on Linux and not a single Windows developer.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 18:48 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (17 responses)

Yeah; You would think that a popular open source application on Windows would get more attention from developers then a the Linux version does.

I wonder if it is because the Linux-style programming approach is a big turn off to Windows developers. Unfamiliar APIs and tools and such. So they go and work on other more windows-focused users.

Does QT/KDE development platform integrate naturally into Visual Studio and such things?

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 19:01 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Yeah, the Qt tools on Windows are pretty good -- integration with Visual Studio only works if you have the full version, not Express, though. And Qt Creator on Windows is very usable. Now, admittedly, setting up KDE in addition to Qt to work with on Windows can be tricky. The best way is to use an emerge-style source based installer that creates a whole environment to work in (http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/Windows/emerge). It's a cool environment, and an amazing achievement, but right now it's involved enough that it takes me about a day to create a full new development environment. And I have been doing that a lot lately, since for some reason Windows partitions, laptops and vm's keep getting corrupted.

However, I've never ever had a Windows developer come up to me and ask to help him get started, so I think that the basic interest just isn't there. I have a suspicion that the idea that you can, like develop software on your own, is not very current on Windows.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 20:49 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (11 responses)

Developing software on Windows is OK, Microsoft tools are top-notch. The only main missing piece for me is valgrind (there are alternatives, but they are significantly more heavy-weight).

However, setting up developer environment for a project with lots of libraries can be tricky. It usually involves manually installing and compiling libraries and then making sure that the target project correctly picks them up.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 22:57 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

Some major problems I've had with Visual Studio 10 Express:

- limited target name length (260+ is not unheard of for generated targets);
- it's not Vim (yeah, personal choice, but Vim integration stuff was broken with 10);
- have to close VS every time I change a CMake file and reconfigure the vcxproj;
- horrendous error output (first thing I do on VS is turn on the Error/Warning window, then line numbers);
- refusal to debug Release applications (not even a backtrace!); and
- can't save command line arguments for "Run target" (or whatever the F5 action is) for later use (I have two files I want to test with, it only remembers one set of arguments).

Honestly, cmake --build is easier lots of the time. This list is by no means exhaustive, just what comes to mind.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 23:07 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

>- have to close VS every time I change a CMake file and reconfigure the vcxproj;
That's not necessary, VS can pick up generated .vcproj changes just fine.

>- refusal to debug Release applications (not even a backtrace!); and
You certainly can do it, if you build debug information (it's called RelWithDebInfo in CMake). MSVC debugger even has very nice infrastructure for interfacing with symbol servers which is useful for post-mortem debugging.

>- can't save command line arguments for "Run target" (or whatever the F5 action is) for later use (I have two files I want to test with, it only remembers one set of arguments).
I think there's a plugin that does this.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 23:28 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> That's not necessary, VS can pick up generated .vcproj changes just fine.
Sure, then I get the cascade of "Would you like to reload this target?" dialogs for 300+ projects because a compiler flag changed (the top-level project didn't change, so it didn't get asked about). Closing is much easier. AFAIK, the plugin which does the auto-yes doesn't work in 10 Express.

> You certainly can do it, if you build debug information (it's called RelWithDebInfo in CMake).
IIRC, the bug wasn't reproducible other than in Release.

> I think there's a plugin that does this.
That's a relief. Just to find it and hope it works with Express… Any hints for the name?

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 23:32 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Ah, yes. Express versions don't support plugins (I've been using professional versions for as long as I can remember).

>> You certainly can do it, if you build debug information (it's called RelWithDebInfo in CMake).
>IIRC, the bug wasn't reproducible other than in Release.
RelWithDebInfo just generates debug information during a release build. It doesn't affect code generation at all.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 2:54 UTC (Tue) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152) [Link]

Well to me the last top-notch tool they ever devloped was Visual Studio 6, every VS after that feels horrible. To me that is, I guess that it is very top-notch for C# developers and people who design GUIs.

Especially the madness of each new version of VC having a pair of new libc:s is what turns me off the most. Whoever made that decision at Microsoft should be thrown out.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 7:47 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (4 responses)

For me, the biggest problem with developing on Windows are the build times. The file system is just so slow! Even when using an ssd, it's slower than building the same codebase on Linux.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 16:37 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

That's probably a problem with the build system. MSVC itself is considerably faster than GCC, especially if you pass several source files at once.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 17:17 UTC (Tue) by 2NZb42fVtpOEyCBv (subscriber, #86247) [Link] (2 responses)

> That's probably a problem with the build system. MSVC itself is considerably faster than GCC, especially if you pass several source files at once.

True - for one project we rewrote our entire build system so that it passed all source files in a dir to the compiler at once, rather than the traditional (e.g. make implicit rules) approach of invoking the compiler once per source file. Transformed Windows build times. I think that it's to do with process creation being absurdly slow on Windows, but didn't look into it.

(That change then broke sparse, because there was a bug that cropped up when you pointed it at multiple source files - IIRC to do with scoping of static variables. Our patch for that got merged moons ago though.)

That makes our Windows builds tolerable. Still, the notion of having your project compilation mechanism dictated to you by the sloth of process creation on an "operating system" is laughable.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 17:29 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

No, it's cl.exe itself, it does a lot of startup initialization. I have no idea why, but it does.

Also, file system on Windows is excruciatingly slow. NTFS on Windows can literally be orders of magnitude slower than ext4 on Linux.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 17:36 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

That's what I said... The _filesystem_ is the problem, not the build system, not the speed of the compiler. I have tried with three different compilers on Windows, mingw, icl and mscv, on a spinning splatter and on ssd. It's the filesystem that makes life unbearable.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 8:22 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

The lots of libraries problem is more or less solved by the KDE Windows project. The emerge system can build pretty much all the dependencies for a big project like Krita out of the box, both with mingw and msvc. There are even two options: one can download most of the dependencies as pre-built binaries, the other will build everything for you.

You'll end up with a tree that looks a bit like a standard unix tree: rootdir/bin, rootdir/lib and so on. From there to packaging the software for an installer is a matter of simply copying the right files to your installer.

If you use kde libraries, then the system is smart enough to make it possible to co-install two kde-based applications and run them at the same time. But even if I would work on a pure-Qt application that needed libraries like lcms, I would still use this system to get all those dependencies ready and in place.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 21:11 UTC (Mon) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

Actually Qt works really great with visual studio, and if you install the Qt Visual Studio Add-in, you get some extra debugging extensions too. If you can debug inside the pimpl structure fine, there is no need for the add-in really. I have not found a single showstopper bug in Qt, in the last couple of years. Using Qt properly there should be hardly any *other* API one may need to get accustomed with.

My guess is that Windows development for office applications is less exciting.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 3:56 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (2 responses)

> Yeah; You would think that a popular open source application on
> Windows would get more attention from developers then a the Linux
> version does.

Ultimately developers do what's fun for them. And there's nothing wrong with that.

If you want to get involved with a Windows port of these applications, I'm sure that they'd be happy to accept your assistance!

I'm curious how these projects are going to handle the fact that the latest version of Visual Studio is not available for no cost.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/no-...

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 8:11 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Actually, Visual Studio isn't necessary -- not even the Microsoft SDK. The Qt SDK comes with Mingw32 out of the box, and that's also the default option for the kde emerge system, which basically builds all the dependent libraries, from libjpeg to openexr, from lcms to libz. It has the advantage of not needing the weird set of C-libraries that you get with each new msvc version, but the disadvantage that apps start much slower.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 13:27 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> If you want to get involved with a Windows port of these applications, I'm sure that they'd be happy to accept your assistance!

Cross platform stuff really isn't that interesting to me. I'd rather program games in Blender (which will take care of popular platform compatiblity for me, hopefully)

If I was going to right cross-platform apps it would be written in Javascript and HTML with a server backend in Python or Java... not so much a fan of C++.

:-)

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 15:47 UTC (Mon) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

The download page says that there is a Windows version in the works, but that it is at the moment, "highly experimental".

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 20:50 UTC (Mon) by apolinsky (subscriber, #19556) [Link] (4 responses)

Perhaps someone could comment about the differences between Open Office (or Libre Office) instead of commenting on the underpinnings of each product. As a programmer, I work primarily on my Freebsd or Linux machines. What advantages would I see over the other alternatives? I must admit I have one machine with a Windows partition, and use an older version of Word on that machine. It WOULD be nice to have a standard suite alternative for all platforms, but currently don't see that in the cards.

Alan

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 13, 2012 21:50 UTC (Mon) by daglwn (guest, #65432) [Link] (3 responses)

This would really be helpful. For example, what is it about Calligra makes it focused toward students/academia?

I use Libre Office simply because it seems to do most of what I need. I would prefer something "better" in some amorphous way I have yet to explicitly determine. Comparisons with other suites might help clarify that.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 9:34 UTC (Tue) by ingwa (guest, #71149) [Link] (2 responses)

We are not focussing on students and academia in general, i.e. the long term. But we have to start somewhere and we are focussing on the needs of the students primarily in our choices on which features to implement at this early stage.

One example of that is that we will have a top-notch bibliography engine in the next version. There is currently a Google Summer of Code project with that objective and as far as I know the results are good.

Something that is also true but wasn't very visible in the announcement is that Calligra is *the* suite to use if you want to build office functionality into something else. It's much easier to do that than with any other free office suite. In fact it's designed from the bottom up to make it possible to create new UI's (even touch based ones) or slash or add features for special builds. Calligra is in several smartphones already as pre-installed applications and right now we in KO GmbH are working on creating a variation of Krita for touch-enabled painting on Windows 8.

This makes it also well suited for research work where you want to build new features and test out on various user groups. One example could be usability studies.

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 14, 2012 11:11 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

Please try to integrate Zotero support into Calligra and you'll have one more use :-). A top-notch bibliography engine would be nice and all that, but it needs support for syncing databases and making use of existing journal style definitions (e.g. CSL engine support which is a separate dedicated component).

Calligra 2.5 released

Posted Aug 15, 2012 11:36 UTC (Wed) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

good to hear that you are targeting bibliography tools (i was going to ask about that). I hope you have a developer who is familiar with strength of the Latex+bibtex+hyperref ways of working.

In my group no one would even consider writing a thesis in anything but latex. I dont think there is any inherent reason that a word processor could not compete.

Another related issue is internal referencing. So i can give a label to a figure or table, reference the label, and automatically get Figure 23 (where the 23 if automatically updated) which will be hyperlinked in the PDF to the figure.

To get scientist you will also need similar strength in equation formatting.