From koffice Wed May 29 07:47:10 2002 From: "Brisset, Nicolas" Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 07:47:10 +0000 To: koffice Subject: user suggestions: kivio stencils, krita, vector drawing, kplato, kmathlab X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=koffice&m=102267883117074 Dear koffice team, I use KDE daily now at home and at work, and I must say I am really = very=20 impressed with the speed at which it progresses and the overall quality = of=20 KDE apps. Of course, koffice still lacks a bit of maturity but I am = sure it=20 will become really usable very soon. Now, I just thought I wanted to make a couple of comments and share = some=20 ideas, some useful and others probably less ;-). Before listing them = up, I=20 just want to apologize for the fact that as a user without C++ coding=20 knowledge, I will probably say some stupid things. Please just ignore=20 mistakes/nonsense ! I am also aware that there aren't so many coders = for=20 koffice yet, so that all of the following cannot happen magically... - kivio stencils: it seems the kivio codebase has not been worked on a = lot in=20 the last months, probably because it is quite stable and feature = complete.=20 However, kivio is not really usable as it is delivered due to the lack = of=20 interesting stencil sets. I looked around on the Internet and found = something=20 interesting: a tool to convert xfig libraries to kivio stencil sets. In = case=20 you did not know it, you can look at=20 http://sourceforge.net/projects/xfig2sml/ for more information. The = only=20 problem is that there are no connection points in the stencil objects, = but=20 this would certainly still be a good base if someone could just rework = the=20 files a bit. Other ideas to make kivio really interesting without too = much=20 effort might be to make it compatible with dia stencil sets. But then = again,=20 I have little notion of the amount of work this would require... On a related note, it could be nice if one could use the standard = koffice=20 vector drawing tool to generate stencil sets. - krayon/krita: I recently discovered Mosfet's PixiePlus and found it = to be=20 really great. In the first version I tried, it had the beginning of an=20 editor, that now seems to have become MosfetPaint (apparently still=20 unreleased, but looks really good). I know there have been problems = with=20 Mosfet in the past, but it seems he's quite a capable coder. Wouldn't = there=20 be the possibility of developing just one image editing application=20 (+pixie-like browser), together with him ? - vector drawing: looks strange that there should be two different = vector=20 drawing tools in koffice ! I am not an expert at vector drawing, but I = fail=20 to see the necessity for two tools... - kplato: a real necessity. Should absolutely be done ! Microsoft = Project is=20 probably the last app that has me reboot into Windows regularly... - kmathlab: (maybe not really a koffice app ?) I have been using Scilab = as a=20 replacement for Matlab for a while now. It is the kind of tool a lot = (if not=20 all) engineers would like to have on their desktop. Scilab is quite = good, but=20 really lacks a good UI. People have apparently developed a gtk+ UI = without=20 too many problems, so why not a Qt/KDE one ? Or even, a totally new = tool=20 based on open-source C++ computation and possibly symbolic algebra = libraries=20 ? An integrated (or independent, or kpart'd) kmatplot-like plotting = tool=20 would also be really interesting. I actually think this would be a real = nice=20 addition to koffice. Thanks for reading this (rather long) e-mail, and CONGRATULATIONS for = the=20 excellent work done so far. Nicolas Brisset ____________________________________ koffice mailing list koffice@mail.kde.org To unsubscribe please visit: http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice