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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: The "Killer" application]
From:       James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj () acm ! org>
Date:       2003-11-25 22:02:37
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Michael Fair wrote:
> I'm excited to see your enthusiasm.  Many of your ideas seem
> to be already implemented or are at least "in the works".
> There was nothing terribly radical about them.  More developers
> of course would help things get done faster.
> 
> Firstly, KOffice doesn't really have many separate applications.
> It has many KParts which are hosted in separate shell applications.

I have had this idea for some time.  Starting with when I first read about OLE in Windows. 
  And, then there was the failure of OpenDoc.  I wondered what Be Productive would be like 
since it promised to discard the paradigm of separate applications in an Office suite. 
But, I can't get the pre-release for Linux to work.

So, I wondered how closely KOffice might come to realizing it.

If it does come close, my question is why KOffice maintains the paradigm of separate 
applications.

I haven't yet had time to play with the new Beta release much.

I had three specific issues:

1.	Can you use the spell checker in other applications?

Yes, it works in the spreadsheet.

2.	Placing single Kspread cells in a KWord document should work as well as it does in 
WordPerfect (with the WordPerfect spreadsheet functions).

Either I haven't figured this out or it needs work.

This issue isn't just for this idea.  To compete with other Office suites you need to be 
able to insert into either a Word document or a presentation Slide, a data object which is 
linked to a Spreadsheet file.

Note that if you haven't used WordPerfect that the free trial version of 8.0 for Linux is 
still available:

http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/downloadwp8.html

3.	Why are there different file formats for different applications?

Or, at least why isn't there a general container file format?  Like with a DTP application.

***

 > text is even aware of them and can flow around them in many ways

This ability is the responsibility of the content creation application for the objects 
which are higher (or closer to the root if you draw your trees the other way) in the tree. 
  But, notice that I said that the information to make this possible should be part of the 
container data structure.

> Anything you see you'd be interested in helping develop?

My main interest is embedding spreadsheet cells in a document, and getting fonts to work 
perfectly.

I should be up front with this even though it is personal because others have 
misunderstood and taken offense.  I am currently on disability.  I have Chronic Fatigue 
Syndrome.  If you check the symptoms of this:

	http://www.cfids.org/about-cfids/symptoms.asp

you will see that when I say that I am not sure about how well I can do at actually 
writing code, I am not making some lame excuse.  I studied EE and CS at Cal Poly SLO and 
UC Santa Barbara.  Although I am a newbie to C++ (I don't know if BS had even thought of 
it when I was in college :-)), I was an very good programmer before I became ill.  I do 
have trouble programing, but my abilities to design things has not been affected.

So, I am willing to try to provide what help I am able to.

I did make a prior commitment to to fix the LPR support in KDE Print, but that isn't a big 
job [I *hope* :-|]

--
JRT

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