Competition

PowerPoint is ok-ish but requires using Windows and doesn’t save in an open format (ODP or PDF). OpenOffice Impress – well, it doesn’t impress. I find the interface clunky and counter-intuitive, resizing images is fiddly, mysterious ugly lines appear around graphics on some machines on which I need to run it and, lacking the network transparency of a KDE app, I can’t work on remote documents via fish, but have to make a local copy (it even has the cheek to claim that opening a remote document is not possible on Linux).

KPresenter 2.2.0

I already had a play with KOffice 2.0 when it came out, but – as the KOffice team made clear at the time – that was really just a technology preview and not stable or featureful enough for day to day use. KOffice 2.1 was also advertised as not ready for general use, but I decided to give it a go and found KWord 2.1 perfectly adequate for the simple tasks I threw at it (I use LaTeX for big docs). I also had a bit of a play with KPresenter 2.1 and was quite impressed, but the only presentation I needed to work on was an adaptation of an older one from OpenOffice Impress that didn’t import well into KPresenter so I stuck with Impress.

This time, however, I decided to give KPresenter a go. So, a few hours later (spread over several days) I have a shiny, new, graphics-heavy presentation produced in KPresenter.

Quick verdict

Is KPresenter ready? Well I didn’t manage to crash it (and I normally manage to crash presentation apps) and found only a few irritations. For my personal use case, at present, there’s nothing better.

Nice points

Configurability and convenience

KPresenter, like all the KOffice apps has a highly configurable interface so that I was able to move tools around to exactly where I found them most convenient. It even shows and hides toolboxes depending on whether you’re moving shapes around or editing texts – which is nice to keep the interface relevant although having things disappear is a bit disconcerting to start with.

Shapes in KPresenter

Shapes

Like the rest of KOffice, shapes are the tool used to add images, text boxes and – well – everything. But it’s in KPresenter that they really seem to shine. Images in particular are easily placed, resized and bordered without right-clicking or drilling down through multiple menus. Items can be grouped and raised and lowered easily and I did a lot of drawing right in the app itself.

There’s also a nice set of default shapes to use, including the ubiquitous ‘gearhead’ figures and speech bubbles that are themselves easily configurable.

Beauty

Being Oxygen, the user interface just looks so much nicer than either Impress or KPresenter 1.6

Some quibbles

Colour selection

The colour selector has a checkbox (on by default?) that hides colours with poor contrast. I didn’t notice this and since it hid black I accidentally made a number of components dark brown instead, something I had to fix later. Personally, I’d rather have the full choice of colours all the time, but it is easy to set it to your personal preference.

PDF export doesn't match page to slide by default

PDF export

KPresenter has a simple to use PDF export function, simply choose it from the file menu and choose a file name. However, the default settings produce a PDF with portrait pages with the landscape slide centred on the page with big margins – not very useful if you want to produce a PDF to use in the presentation (for example if the presentation PC might not have KPresenter on it).

You can however work around this by instead choosing to print the document to PDF and manually setting up a page with the correct aspect ratio and no margins – it’s not difficult, just takes a bit longer.

And yes, there’s a bug report.

Lists

Bulleted lists are not quite right yet – if you use a large font then the decoration is small and not vertically centred (bug report).

Conclusion

Overall, on the basis of my experience with KPresenter – and a brief play with KWord and KSpread – I think KOffice 2.2 is definitely worth a look and, yes, it is ready for real work. Even with the niggles outlined above, KPresenter will now be my application of choice for preparing presentations – I find it the most comfortable application to use for this task on any platform. Of course, depending on your particular needs, your views may differ.

KOffice is very exciting right now. It has always been – for me – the nicest office suite to actually use, but in the old days it was held back by a lack of some advanced features, a file format that no one else used and limited import and export capabilities. Now that it has standardised on OpenDocument, is able to import proprietary formats and seems to be developing quickly the future looks bright.

LJ Feb 2010

Nonetheless, something I did back in November came to fruition this week. A few months ago Jos got in touch with the folks at Linux Journal to see if they might be interested in some KDE related articles for their February issue. It turned out they were and so the latest issue has plenty of KDE content with Jos’s interview with Aaron and Sebas about KDE’s future, Riccardo‘s article on writing Plasma Widgets and my article on running KDE software on Windows.

Linux Journal uses a subscription model, but they make their archive available for free a month or two after publication and (if you didn’t use it already) you can get a free PDF trial copy of the current issue by filling in an online form.

A couple of choice quotes:

“The [KWin] composition performance feels faster than Gnome + Compiz, and much better integrated”

“It still doesn’t match all my needs but it’s very close to being as usable as Gnome”

Not bad for someone who says he’s always been quite happy with Gnome.

One thing I should say – this isn’t about stealing users from Gnome (is Steven going to switch permanently? I don’t know and I think he should just use whatever is best for him). But it is nice to see KDE 4 attracting interest from people who haven’t previously had any interest in KDE software. Part of this is because KDE 4 is new and shiny and I’m sure I’ll want to check out Gnome 3 when that arrives, but if we’re attracting positive attention from Gnome users then perhaps we’re also better placed to appeal to users of the real competition.