KOffice and GSoC

Quite some time ago, 3 summers some may count, the plan and work started on what was to become KOffice2.
We are reaching our first major milestone which is the 2.0 release. Minimal application functionality and lots of useful new technology, but most importantly lots of ability to extend and enhance the apps without having to work on the core libraries or applications.

The release of 2.0 will appeal mostly to users that want to play with the new concepts and the power of flake. ODF interoperability is a major drive, and will continue to be. At the cost of some user-level features. So apologies to those that enjoy mail merge. Thats postponed to a later version.
The upcoming 2.0 release will also be a technology breading ground. Combining the power of the Qt libraries with the power of Office applications has been our major goal from the beginning.

I expect that the 2.0 release is out or in its final phase when the Summer of Code of 2009 starts. This gives those students that want to apply a great many creative things to choose from, I bet most are so new or different that people have not really considered them.
So here is a list of things I came up with over the last years;

• use qtwebkit to write a KOffice plugin that allows you to navigate openClipArt.org and download your clipart. It would naturally insert the clipart directly into your KOffice document.
• Write text-shape plugins
  Just to give you some direction of what this implies, here are two examples;
  • A plugin that recognizes (media)wiki type markup and replaces it with KWord style markup.
  • Colorization plugin. For those that publish pieces with sourcecode, being able to colorize text is a really useful tool.
• We have a music shape that was started in a previous Summer of code, but its not nearly reached its full potential.
• The 2.0 release of KOffice lacks the formula component while the 1.x version had a pretty good one. We need to have someone create a formula flake-shape.
• Create a flake-shape that downloads a vector based map from OpenStreetMap. The selection of the area can be done via marble or via qtwebkit and after downloading the flake shape should be able to paint the contents on screen allowing users to easilly insert a map into their KOffice documents.
• Create various borders that can be added to any KoShape. There is a border plugin type that allows you to create any sort of border. No longer just silly lined borders.

On the topic of KOffice2.0 and its upcoming release; userbase.kde.org will be used more as a place to put information that the end user will find attractive. The first step has been the import of the KWord manual into http://userbase.kde.org/KWord/Manual . Big hand goes to Anne Wilson who has put a lot of time into that. As this manual is old we should get some interested people together to update the manual to the current version.

Anyone interested in any of the above things; please contact the koffice team at the mailinglist or on irc.freenode.org on #koffice