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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: KOffice History
From:       Thomas Zander <zander () kde ! org>
Date:       2009-05-17 9:42:22
Message-ID: 200905171142.23459.zander () kde ! org
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On Saturday 16. May 2009 21.02.42 Richard Georg Bayer wrote:
> Is there a document about the history of KOffice? And if there is
> none, would someone please tell me "how it all started"?

As I am the one around longest, I can write something; others may be 
amused about the oldy talking ;)

The first I heard about KOffice was the koffice.org website that showed the 
concept of object-embedding. So I could put karbon vector drawing directly 
inside my word processing document.
I checked out the KOffice sources and my first patch must have been 
around 1999. This is all before any KOffice application has ever been 
released to the public.
I got in contact with the guy that wrote most of what was there in KWord at 
that time. His name is Reginald. And we ended up rewriting large classes. A 
fun detail is that this was my first big C++ project, and when Reggy started 
KWord also was his first big C++ project.

I was the non-official maintainer of KWord when we made the 1.0 release[1] 
October 2000.
This was all against Qt2 and we used the text engine and printing engine 
from Qt. We still do.
Up until Qt3 and KOffice 1.6 the printing and text engines were ok but not of 
professional quality. You could expect funny things like your text fitting 
perfectly in a table-cell sticking out half a centimeter when you printed 
it. This was one reason I spent less time on koffice and David Faure took 
over as maintainer in 2001 [2]
Our community of contributors grew and with the release of 1.4 we 
supported ODF as our secondary fileformat.
After KWord 1.6 was branched (march 2006 [3]) I started looking at the Qt4 
framework, all the big obstacles in the older versions of Qt were gone; the 
promise of true WYSIWYG and much better printing capabilities were 
looming. Only we had to port to Qt4.
For KWord at least the releases of KOffice 1.6 were all just updates; not 
much has happened there.
The real work was going into the preparation of KOffice2, which for KWord 
meant almost a complete rewrite.  Nearly a decade of experience put into a 
new codebase :)
But seriously;  The Qt3 to Qt4 upgrade was not easy but it was really the 
fundamentally different way of doing things that caused me to decide within 
a week of coding it should be a rewrite.
This turned out to be a lot of work those 3 years, but I'm proud to say it 
was worth it. KWord2.0 has stayed true to its initial design philosophy but 
we added a *lot* of features in 2.0 in those lower levels. They will become 
apparent over the KOffice2 series 

In KOffice2 we made a new approach to object embedding, the thing I was 
attracted to a decade before. We made it actually much better and we can 
properly print it and its much more powerful all in all. We called it Flake 
and its just starting to show its promise.

ps. I'm sure my memory is failing at some details, though I've done my best 
to at least look up the dates. Other oldies are surely invited to correct me 
or add important details that I missed.

1) http://kde.org/announcements/announce-2.0.php
2) 
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/koffice/kword/AUTHORS?revision=89908&view=markup&pathrev=100000
3) http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=522032
-- 
Thomas Zander
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