KOffice Summer of Code Project
First it was Easter, so I was too busy to even participate in the KDE Google Summer of Code irc discussions, and then I was busy hacking our new house (and in fact I should be updating my KSpread spreadsheet with all the money I've spent on plasterboard, wood, copper tubing and so on), but, well, I just want to spend a few minutes highlighting the excellent projects we've got for the 2007 Google Summer of Code for KOffice -- and Krita.
I'm mentoring Marijn Kruisselbrink who's going to try to build a flake shape that makes it possible to have editable music notation right in any KOffice application. The funny thing about this project is that it's so obvious that it's incredible it's unique. I mean -- most word processors have a formula editor for mathematical formulas. But I very much doubt that the group of people needing formulas in their documents is larger than the group of people needing to print a melody in their documents. All over the world, choirs (amateur, church or otherwise) and dancing groups are publishing news sheets with text and music mixed together. Then there are musicologists who occupy about the same niche as mathematicians in their needs -- a whopping great audience who until now had to make do with embedded eps files or, if they are geeks, Latex and lilypond. Marijn is visiting me next Sunday so we can get off on a flying start. I'm really excited about this.
Sven Langkamp, mentored by Casper Boemann, is going to implement various selection visualizations for Krita. We already had a mask-like visualization that had some limitations, users want marching ants and there may be more. Sven is already on his third implementation of marching ants -- whee!
Emanuele Tamponi is going to make a brave dash at implementing painterly features -- wetness, semi-realistic paint mixing, visualizations. Krita is ready for this kind of work, and we know Emanuele can deliver. And, hey! That makes two Krita projects this year!
Cyrille Berger managed to get Igor Stepin's collaborative editing for KOffice in -- Abiword can already do this, but after consultation with the Abiword guys it was clear that their system isn't suitable for cross-app purposes. Igor is going to concentrate on KWord, which seems a wise choice given the complexities involved, and given that he'll have to invent a protocol himself.
Pierre Ducroquet is going to be mentored by Sebastian Sauer, the Kross guru to work on improving OpenDocument compatibility for KWord. This will likely involve adding missing features to KWord itself and -- hopefully! -- double the number of steady KWord developers by the end of the summer. Click on the link -- Pierre is nothing if not ambitious in his outline!
Flake shapes are not the only innovation in KOffice that should lead to easy third-party extensibility. It's inordinately easy to add plugins that extend the text handling of KWord -- and by extension of all KOffice applications that need rich text. Fredy Yanardi, mentored by Tomas Mecir, is going to demonstrate just that.
Six projects, six chances to make KOffice 2.0 take a giant leap forward!
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