KOffice Applications

Currently, KOffice includes KSpread, KPresenter, Kontour, Karbon14, KWord, KFormula, KChart, Kugar, Krita, Kivio, and Kontact (see Table 11-3). KSpread is a spreadsheet, KPresenter is a presentation application, Kontour is a vector drawing program, Karbon14 is a vector graphics program, KWord is a Publisher-like word processor, KFormula is a formula editor, and KChart generates charts and diagrams. Kugar is a report generator, Krita is a bitmap image editor, Kivio creates flow charts, and Kontact is an integrated contact application including Kmail, Korganizer, Kaddressbook, and Knotes.

Table 11-3: KOffice Applications

Application	Description
KSpread	Spreadsheet
KPresenter	Presentation program
Kontour	Vector drawing program
Karbon14	Vector graphics program
KWord	Word processor (desktop publisher)
KFormula	Mathematical formula editor
KChart	Tool for drawing charts and diagrams
Kugar	Report generator
Krita	Paint and Image manipulation program
Kivio	Flow chart generator and editor (similar to Vivio)
Kontact	Contact application including mail, address book, and organizer tools

KSpread is the spreadsheet application, which incorporates the basic operations found in most spreadsheets, with formulas similar to those used in Excel. You can also embed charts, pictures, or formulas using KChart, Krita, Kontour, or KFormula.

With KChart, you can create different kinds of charts, such as bar graphs, pie charts, and line graphs, as well as create diagrams. To generate a chart, you can use data in KSpread to enter your data. With KPresenter, you can create presentations consisting of text and graphics modeled using different fonts, orientations, and attributes such as colors. You can add such elements as speech bubbles, arrows, and clip art, as well as embed any KOffice component. Kontour is a vector-based graphics program, much like Adobe Illustrator, OpenDraw, and Corel Draw. It supports the standard graphic operations such as rotating, scaling, and aligning objects.

KWord can best be described as a desktop publisher, with many of the features found in publishing applications like Microsoft Publisher and FrameMaker. Although it is also a fully functional word processor, KWord is not page-based like Word or WordPerfect. Instead, text is set up in frames that are placed on the page like objects. Frames, like objects in a drawing program, can be moved, resized, and even reoriented. You can organize frames into a frame set, having text flow from one to the other. Formatting can be applied to a frame set, changing features in all the frames belonging to it at once. The default frame set up for you when you first create a document is the same size as the page. This gives you the effect of a page-based word processor, enabling you to work as if you were using a standard word processor. You can, of course, change the size of your frame and add new ones, if you want.

KFormula is a formula editor used to generate mathematical formulas. Kivio is a flow chart application similar to Visio. Kivio has the ability to generate flow charts using scriptable objects. Given a network, Kivio can generate a flow chart for it. With Java header files, it can generate a flow chart of Java objects. Krita (formerly KImageShop) is an image editor, much like Photoshop.

KParts

Embedded components support real-time updates. For example, if you use KChart to generate a chart in a KWord document using data in a KSpread spreadsheet and then change the selected data in the spreadsheet, KChart automatically updates the chart in the KWord document. In effect, you are creating a compound document—one made up of several applications. This capability is implemented by the KDE component model known as KParts. KParts provides communication between distributed objects. In this respect, you can think of an application working also as a server, providing other applications with the services it specializes in. A word processor, specializing in services such as paragraph formatting or spell-checking, could provide these services to all KOffice applications. In that way, other applications do not need to have their own text formatting functions written into them.

KParts is implemented with DCOP, the Desktop Communications Protocol. This is a very simple, small, and fast IPC/RPC mechanism for interprocess communication (IPC) and is based on the X Window System's ICE (Inter-Client Exchange) Protocol. KDE applications now use DCOP libraries to manage their communications with each other. DCOP makes development of KOffice applications much easier and more stable.

With KOffice, you create one kind of document rather than separate ones for different applications. The different applications become views of this document, adding their components to it. KWord sets up the publishing and word processing components, Kontour adds drawing components, while KSpread adds spreadsheet components. You use the appropriate application to view the different components in the single document. This means you can have separate windows open at the same time for different components of the document.