Rendering slides is a complicated business. Slides can contain tons of different features just like webpages can. People expect that presentations look the same in different programs. Perhaps not pixel-perfect but very similar nevertheless.

OpenOffice and KOffice (and the Maemo/Meego Office Viewer) both have ODF as their main file format. ODF is an open standard and this means exchanging data between these programs should be simple and lossless. To help the developers of these programs find differences in rendering of slides, I have written a program that loads a presentation and shows it as rendered by KOffice and OpenOffice.

As an added bonus, it also shows how these programs render PowerPoint files. PowerPoint files are converted to ODP first and then loaded into each of the two rendering engines. That gives four types of output:

• Converted by OpenOffice to ODP and rendered by OpenOffice
• Converted by KOffice to ODP and rendered by KOffice
• Converted by KOffice to ODP and rendered by OpenOffice
• Converted by OpenOffice to ODP and rendered by KOffice

You can see an example view in the screenshot and screencast below.

The code has been announced on the koffice mailing list.

Ogg Theora screencast of SlideCompare
Flash screencast of SlideCompare

Today, Nokia released the first public version of the office document viewer for the Nokia N900 phone. It was uploaded to the Maemo repositories. This version supports text files, spreadsheets and presentations in OpenDocument format (ODF) and Microsoft Office formats. The viewer requires the latest update (PR1.1) to the N900 software. You can install 'Office Viewer' by adding the maemo-devel repository to your N900 catalogues:

Catalog name:

Maemo Extras-devel

Web address:

http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel

Distribution:

fremantle

Components:

free

Then the application 'freoffice' will be available in the category 'Office'. The install is 9 megabytes.

With the viewer, you can open multiple files at once, open office documents from your e-mail, search in office files and copy and paste from your documents. A very nice feature is the ability to give presentations with the phone. Here are some screen shots of the viewer running on the N900.

The code for this viewer is available in the KOffice repository. New releases of the viewer will be uploaded to the repository as KOffice progresses towards version 2.2.

The viewer has a simple user interface and responds quickly to user input such as page changing and scrolling.

How's possible that most of my nightly builds I mention here, come from Berlin so far? Tasty food ensured by Trolltech or KDAB? Weißbier?

(gfx by mkbart, based on Oxygen icons)

In Berlin KDAB headquarters we have found all facilities needed for hacking. Awesome!

Anyway, here come another two KOffice apps running on Windows. Read on for tasty screenshots >>>

Sometimes KDE makes me want to cry out of frustration (like tonight, because of Qt using select(2) instead of poll(2), breaking my akregator), but sometimes it just fills me with so much joy that I could also cry =) Like just now, when someone came in #koffice to ask if he could somehow print his presentation notes that he put in KPresenter. Unfortunately, I did not know how to do that (quite likely it's just not possible), but it took me just a few minutes tinkering around with DCOP (yes, people still use KDE3.5 technology for work ) to make a tiny script that just prints out all your notes!

Of course, the person already copypasted all his notes manually, but for posterity I hereby present my small shellscript: kpresenternotes. Have fun with it (or not ).

Example output:
$ ./kspreadnotes.sh
The notes of page 0 are:
Ladielala
Notes for slide 1
The notes of page 1 are:
Having some notes fun on slide 2
Done