CalligraSuite

Calligra Suite is an office suite and graphic arts editor developed by KDE as a fork of KOffice in 2010. It is available for desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones. It contains a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a database manager, a vector graphics editor, and a digital painting application.

Calligra uses OpenDocument as the default file format in most applications and can import other formats such as Microsoft Office. Calligra is based on the KDE Platform and is often used with the Plasma framework.

Supported platforms

Calligra Active showing a presentation.

Calligra Suite is built on top of Qt and can therefore be ported to any Qt-compatible platform with relative ease.

Desktop

The main platform Calligra works on is desktop computers. It is available for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows, with Linux being the best supported operating system. A version of Calligra's predecessor, KOffice, was ported to the Haiku operating system.

All features are available on the desktop platform.

Smartphones

Calligra Mobile is a version for smartphones. Its main purpose is to serve as a document viewer for devices running Maemo or its successor, MeeGo, but it also has simple editing features. This version only includes Words, Sheets and Stage.

Development started in summer 2009 and was first shown during Akademy / Desktop Summit 2009 by KO GmbH as a simple KOffice port for Maemo. Nokia later contracted KO to help them with a full mobile version, including a user interface for touch screens that was presented by Nokia during the Maemo Conference in October 2009. The first alpha version was available at January 2010. Along with the release of the Nokia N9 smartphone, Nokia released its own office document viewer based on Poppler and Calligra under the GPL license.

Tablets

Calligra Active was released after the Plasma Active initiative provided a document viewer similar to Calligra Mobile but for tablets. Like Calligra Mobile , only includes Words, Sheets, and Stage.

On January 12, 2012, an experimental version of Calligra for Android was announced. It was originally based on Calligra Mobile, but the base was changed to Calligra Active for performance reasons.

History

Calligra Suite was created as a result of the split of the KOffice community in 2010, after disagreements between the core developers. After arbitration with community members several applications were rebranded by both communities. all but one of the developers joined the Calligra project. The Kexi, Krita and KPlato applications and mobile user interfaces have been completely removed from KOffice and are only available in Calligra. A new application called Braindump has been added to Calligra after the split and KWord was replaced by the new word processor Calligra Words.

KOffice 2.3, released on December 31, 2010, along with subsequent bugfix releases (2.3.1 – 2.3.3) were still the joint collaboration of the KOffice and Calligra development teams.. According to its developers, that version was stable enough for real use, and Karbon14, Krita and KSpread were recommended for production environments..

On May 18, 2011, the Calligra team began releasing monthly snapshots in preparation for the release of Calligra 2.4.

The first version of Calligra Suite for Windows was released on December 21, 2011. The package was labeled "very experimental" and "not yet suitable for everyday use".

The Calligra team originally scheduled to release the final version 2.4 in January 2012, but Words and Stage undo/redo issues necessitated a rewrite partial and caused a delay. Calligra 2.4 was released on April 11, 2012. Starting with version 2.4, Calligra developers are targeting a four-month release cycle.

Components

	Words	A text processor with style sheets and frame support for the auto-editing of complex designs. It is compatible with Microsoft Word documents. Previously he was known as KWord.
	Sheets	A spreadsheet with multiple sheet support, templates and more than 100 mathematical formulas. Previously he was known as KSpread and Calligra Tables.
	Stage	A presentation program with image support and effects. Previously known as KPresenter.
	Kexi	An integrated data management application, designed as a competitor of Microsoft Access and FileMaker. It can be used for designing and implementing databases, inserting and processing data and consulting. It has limited compatibility with MS Access file format. Includes a report designer to replace Kugar.
	Plan	A project manager that can create Gantt diagrams. Previously he was known as KPlato.
	Braindump	A mind-catching app that was first introduced in Calligra Suite 2.4.
	Flow	A program of drawing programmable flow diagrams with stencils dynamically charged. Previously he was known as Kivio.
	Karbon	A vector drawing tool with a variety of drawing and editing tools. Previously he was known as Karbon14.
	Krita	A rasterized image manipulation program primarily designed as a drawing tool with some image editing features. Previously he was known as Krayon and KImageshop.
	Author	An electronic book creation tool similar to iBooks Author that can export in EPUB format. It was first introduced in Calligra Suite 2.6.

Reception

Initial reception shortly after the release of version 2.4 was positive. Bruce Byfield wrote in Linux Magazine: "Calligra needed an impressive first release. Perhaps surprisingly, and to the dev team's credit, it has made it in version 2.4", but he also pointed out that "Words in particular, is still lacking in features" 3. 4;. He concluded that "the Calligra project is worth keeping an eye on."

Germany's sister publication, LinuxUser 10/2012, reviewed Calligra 2.5 on September 12, 2012. Its reception was mostly positive. The negative review was focused on the stability of Words: "During our evaluation, no Calligra module is completely bug free, however bugs in Words they reached an amount that we cannot recommend for general use". Reviewer Thomas Drilling instead praised Calligra's usability, writing: "The consistent workflow, often incredibly intuitive solution-providing and clear menu structure are well received". He then concluded: "The quality of the different modules varies: While Words shows weaknesses, the image editor Krita, the spreadsheet Sheets and the presentation program Stage totally won us over. The flowchart editor Flow makes drawing flowcharts really easy with its wide range of templates".

Technical details

Calligra applications are developed using Qt and the KDE Platform. All of its components are released under free software licenses and use OpenDocument as their native file format whenever possible. Calligra is released independently of the KDE Software Compilation.

The Calligra developers plan to share as much infrastructure as possible between the applications to reduce bugs and improve the user experience. This is achieved using technologies such as Flake and Pigment as much as possible within applications. They also want to create an OpenDocument library for use in other KDE applications that will allow developers to easily add support for reading and outputting OpenDocument files into their applications. Automating tasks and extending the suite with custom functionality can be done with D -Bus or with interpreted languages such as Python, Ruby and JavaScript.