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.

I've been improving the .doc import of KWord over the last couple of months (besides working on tables)

I must say it has been quite a dramatic improvement. From having each paragraph being loaded onto each own page with the formatting all wrong, no tables, page size wrong, and many other bugs all over, I'm pleased to say that I'll this weekend give the .doc import a real world test, as I'll be conducting a 2,5 hour lecture using KWord to go through a 40 page document with tables, images inside tables, pagebreaks and lots of formatting.

I'm quite excited as this will be the first indication to me that KWord is getting ready for real use. We are not there yet for everyone, but I certainly intend to be using KWord as more than a .doc viewer in the future. That future still requires some hard work which I'm glad to be doing as my full time day job employed by KO GmbH

So Elvis Stansvik and I have been working on table support for KWord. And simultaneously I've been working on improving the MS .doc import filter for KWord. I've improved the generally font and paragraph import enormously, but in this blog I'll focus on the table import.

First I'll show you the original MSWord table:

And then how it looks in OOWriter 3.0:

And in AbiWord:

And then finally in KWord:

I think you can see how good our support already is, and that we already beat OpenOffice. Obviously there are some glitches in the corners but I'm fairly sure those problems can at the very least be minimized.

I also still miss to load the tablecell padding. If you look closely you can see the cells are not completely the correct size yet.

So stay tuned as this will all come in KOffice 2.1 which has just entered freeze and will be released in a couple of months. Due to the freeze the table support in 2.1 will however only be as a viewer basically. Ok you will be able to enter text into cells and even create a table, but you will not be able to add or remove columns or cells or change column width etc. These user interface things are scheduled for 2.2.

It's a while I blogged last time about the progress on the goggle summer of code project to Improve OpenDocument in KWord. Mainly cause after working on a lot of smaller things till the mid-term we picked one of the bigger tasks and spend last weeks on it: pagestyles also known as masterpages.

While working on Improving OpenDocument in KWord for gsoc2008 we enjoyed today again one of this very productive pair-programming days. The todays goal was not that difficult: get those svg:x and svg:y positions for text-anchors (which are used to position frames like e.g. an image relative to there anchor) working.