Summer of Code for KOffice
KOffice got four Summer of Code projects from the 24 allotted to KDE, which is quite nice. It was going to be five, with Ariya's Excel Export filter project as the fifth. However, since Ariya had also entered a project for Open Office, and since Google when students are chosen for two or more projects, favours the smaller, he was accepted for OpenOffice.
KDE didn't lose the slot, though, we had two backup projects: one for KOffice, one for KDE. But Google placed the other project, so KOffice is down to four. Slightly less excellent for us, but for KDE as a whole not a big deal.
And the projects KOffice has got are real dozies:
- For Krita, Thrain (or Emanuele Tamponi) is going to try to add bezier and scissors tools, under the mentorship of Bart Coppens. After meeting Emanuele yesterday on irc, I'm convinced that he fits right in with the team. Which means that he's officially declared to be as nutty as the rest of us.
- Under the stewardship of David Faure, Alfredo Beaumont Sainz is going to implement full native ODF and MathML support in KFormula. I've every confidence in the success of this project, since Alfredo is KFormula's brand-new maintainer.
- I am going to mentor Fredrik Edemar to implement two things for KWord: basic version control and heading recognition. The latter is quite interesting: Frederik wants to make KWord to assign styles to paragraphs based on text, recognizing when a user types a heading. This is something I like a lot: too often, word processors either allow the user to do all formatting, resulting in documents without structure, or force users to create structure, which they -- rightly! -- don't want to do. What a good word processor should do is recognize the way the user formats the document and create structure. That's the next level, and I'm convinced it's going to be copied a lot.
- Cyrille Berger is going to mentor amazingly erudite Gábor Lehel to turn his Krita-specific layer widget into a cool, Qt4-style compliant, model-view, generic layer/document structure/page preview widget for KOffice 2.0. This widget will go a long way to enabling us to realize the vision presented by the winner of the KOffice 2.0 design competition, Martin Pfeiffer.
This year's Summer of Code looks like it's going to be a runaway success for KOffice!
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