KOffice History

[Richard Georg Bayer]

Hi,

this is not on installation and usage of the KOffice suite, but on
documentation.

I was looking for information on KOffice history and did not find
out much so far. The english Wikipedia contains a paragraph
about the history of KWord in the KWord article. And that is
all so far I found.

Is there a document about the history of KOffice? And if there is
none, would someone please tell me "how it all started"?

I guess I would find time to put the information collected to the
english, german and czech wikipedia.

Thanx everyone,

Richard G. Bayer (Czech Republic)
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On Saturday 16 May 2009, Richard Georg Bayer wrote:

> Hi,
>
> this is not on installation and usage of the KOffice suite, but on
> documentation.
>
> I was looking for information on KOffice history and did not find
> out much so far. The english Wikipedia contains a paragraph
> about the history of KWord in the KWord article. And that is
> all so far I found.
>
> Is there a document about the history of KOffice? And if there is
> none, would someone please tell me "how it all started"?
>
> I guess I would find time to put the information collected to the
> english, german and czech wikipedia.

There isn't anything pre-canned, I'm afraid, and much of the early history has
gone by now because websites have dropped old articles or have disappeared. I
did recently do a little investigation into the history of KOffice myself, but
I don't seem to be able to actually find the document I wrote. And for
wikipedea, you need to cite stuff, of course, instead of doing original
research :-)

There is next to no-one still around who worked on KOffice in the beginning.

This is a nice interview from the early days:
http://www.freehackers.org/Fosdem_2002:_Koffice_team_interview.
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-10-10-001-10-NW-LF and
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3216 place the early history of KOffice in
its wider KDE context.

This is the original thesis that started it all: Weis, T.: Dynamische
Konfiguration von Anwendungen, Master Thesis, J.W.G. Universität, Frankfurt,
1999. You might be able to find copies of his two other articles: Weis, T.:
Stück für Stück, OpenParts - ein freies Objektmodell für Unix, iX, (8) 1998,
page 58. and Weis, T.: Kompositionen in "K", Das CORBA-basierte Komponenten-
Modell für KDE, c´t, (2) 1999, page 152. See also http://www.unix-ag.uni-
kl.de/~linux/linuxtag99/koffice.html.

I'll see whether I can retrieve the document I wrote, but it isn't more than
one or two paragraphs, and it's based on the links I gave you above :-)

--
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org
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On Saturday 16 May 2009 20:02:42 Richard Georg Bayer wrote:

> Hi,
>
> this is not on installation and usage of the KOffice suite, but on
> documentation.
>
> I was looking for information on KOffice history and did not find
> out much so far. The english Wikipedia contains a paragraph
> about the history of KWord in the KWord article. And that is
> all so far I found.
>
> Is there a document about the history of KOffice? And if there is
> none, would someone please tell me "how it all started"?
>
> I guess I would find time to put the information collected to the
> english, german and czech wikipedia.
>

That would be a nice addition to UserBase, too (http://userbase.kde.org).  If

you manage to put something together and would like help to wikify it,  please
contact me off-list.

Anne


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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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