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List:       koffice
Subject:    user suggestions: kivio stencils, krita, vector drawing, kplato, kmathlab
From:       "Brisset, Nicolas" <Nicolas.Brisset () eurocopter ! com>
Date:       2002-05-29 7:47:10
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Dear koffice team,

I use KDE daily now at home and at work, and I must say I am really very 
impressed with the speed at which it progresses and the overall quality of 
KDE apps. Of course, koffice still lacks a bit of maturity but I am sure it 
will become really usable very soon.

Now, I just thought I wanted to make a couple of comments and share some 
ideas, some useful and others probably less ;-). Before listing them up, I 
just want to apologize for the fact that as a user without C++ coding 
knowledge, I will probably say some stupid things. Please just ignore 
mistakes/nonsense ! I am also aware that there aren't so many coders for 
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 
the last months, probably because it is quite stable and feature complete. 
However, kivio is not really usable as it is delivered due to the lack of 
interesting stencil sets. I looked around on the Internet and found something 
interesting: a tool to convert xfig libraries to kivio stencil sets. In case 
you did not know it, you can look at 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xfig2sml/ for more information. The only 
problem is that there are no connection points in the stencil objects, but 
this would certainly still be a good base if someone could just rework the 
files a bit. Other ideas to make kivio really interesting without too much 
effort might be to make it compatible with dia stencil sets. But then again, 
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 
vector drawing tool to generate stencil sets.

- krayon/krita: I recently discovered Mosfet's PixiePlus and found it to be 
really great. In the first version I tried, it had the beginning of an 
editor, that now seems to have become MosfetPaint (apparently still 
unreleased, but looks really good). I know there have been problems with 
Mosfet in the past, but it seems he's quite a capable coder. Wouldn't there 
be the possibility of developing just one image editing application 
(+pixie-like browser), together with him ?

- vector drawing: looks strange that there should be two different vector 
drawing tools in koffice ! I am not an expert at vector drawing, but I fail 
to see the necessity for two tools...

- kplato: a real necessity. Should absolutely be done ! Microsoft Project is 
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 
replacement for Matlab for a while now. It is the kind of tool a lot (if not 
all) engineers would like to have on their desktop. Scilab is quite good, but 
really lacks a good UI. People have apparently developed a gtk+ UI without 
too many problems, so why not a Qt/KDE one ? Or even, a totally new tool 
based on open-source C++ computation and possibly symbolic algebra libraries 
? An integrated (or independent, or kpart'd) kmatplot-like plotting tool 
would also be really interesting. I actually think this would be a real nice 
addition to koffice.


Thanks for reading this (rather long) e-mail, and CONGRATULATIONS for the 
excellent work done so far.


Nicolas Brisset
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