calligra-data 1:2.8.1-1-0ubuntu3 / usr / share / doc / kde / HTML / en / calligra / index.docbook

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<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//KDE//DTD DocBook XML V4.2-Based Variant V1.1//EN" "dtd/kdex.dtd" [
 <!ENTITY sheets "<application>Calligra Sheets</application>">
 <!ENTITY words "<application>Calligra Words</application>">
 <!ENTITY stage "<application>Calligra Stage</application>">
 <!ENTITY flow "<application>Calligra Flow</application>">
 <!ENTITY plan "<application>Calligra Plan</application>">
 <!ENTITY karbon "<application>Calligra Karbon</application>">
 <!ENTITY calligra "Calligra">
 <!ENTITY kappname "&calligra;">
 <!ENTITY package "Calligra">
 <!ENTITY % addindex "IGNORE">
 <!ENTITY % English "INCLUDE" > <!-- change language only here -->
]>

<!-- maintained by raphael.langerhorst@kdemail.net -->

<book id="calligra" lang="&language;">
<bookinfo>
<title>&calligra;</title>
<subtitle>A General Introduction</subtitle>
<authorgroup>
<author>
&Raphael.Langerhorst; &Raphael.Langerhorst.mail;
</author>
<author>
&Jost.Schenck; &Jost.Schenck.mail;
</author>
<!-- TRANS:ROLES_OF_TRANSLATORS -->
</authorgroup>

<date>2012-01-03</date>
<releaseinfo>2.4.0</releaseinfo>

<abstract>
<para>
&calligra; is a graphic art and office suite by &kde;.
</para>
</abstract>

<keywordset>
<keyword>KDE</keyword>
<keyword>Calligra</keyword>
</keywordset>

</bookinfo>


<chapter id="introduction">
<title>Introduction</title>
<sect1>
<title>&calligra; components</title>

<important> <para>Please check <ulink url="http://docs.kde.org/development/en/calligra/calligra/index.html">http://docs.kde.org</ulink>
for updated versions of this document.</para></important>

<para>
&calligra; is a graphic art and office suite by &kde;.
&calligra; consists of the following components:
</para>

<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>&words; (a frames-based wordprocessor)</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&sheets; (a spreadsheet application)</para></listitem> 
<listitem><para>&stage; (screen and slide presentations)</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&flow; (a flowchart application)</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&karbon; (a vector drawing application)</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&krita; (a pixel based drawing application)</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&kexi; (an integrated environment for managing data)</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&plan; (a project management application)</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

<para>
Because these components use Flake technology, &calligra;
components are designed to work very well with each other. Many &calligra;
component can be embedded in another &calligra; document. For instance, you
can insert a spreadsheet which you created in &sheets; directly into a &words;
document. In this way, complex, compound documents can be created using
&calligra;.
</para>

<para>
A plugin mechanism makes it easy to extend the functionality of
&calligra;. You will find many plugins in some of the components
and can learn how to write plugins yourself.
</para>

<para>
This manual only covers the general features of &calligra;, those that
are common to most or all components in the suite. For detailed information
about the different components, have a look at the respective manual.
</para>

</sect1>

<sect1 id="features">
<title>Overview of &calligra; features</title>
<sect2 id="featureintegration">
<title>Integration</title>
<para>
&calligra; provides a framework that all components build on. Through
this framework high integration is achieved. It is possible to develop
your own component that integrates as well. 
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="featureleightweight">
<title>Lightweight</title>
<para>
Despite offering so many components, &calligra; is lightweight, fast and
has a rather low memory footprint. This is also achieved because &calligra; builds
on &kde;, a powerful application development framework.
</para>
<para>
A goal of &calligra; is also to not overload the user interface with features
that are hardly needed. This results in a lean and mean user interface that
lets you do your work efficiently.
</para>
<para>
Being lightweight can at times also mean that that very particular special
functionality you need is not there. In this case you can always add the
functionality yourself by extending &calligra;. Extra features can always be made available through
additional plugins or scripts, thus keeping &calligra; itself lightweight.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="featurecompleteness">
<title>Completeness</title>
<para>
&calligra; offers a wide range of components, covering most of the home
and business office needs. Additional features can always be implemented
through scripts, plugins or even whole components based on the &calligra;
framework.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="featurefileformat">
<title>OASIS OpenDocument Format</title>
<para>
It is a major importance for any office suite to adhere to established
standards. Especially on the file format level to allow seamless document
exchange with other office suites. This also avoids vendor lock-in, which
is especially important for companies and also for individuals.
</para>
<para>
For this reason &calligra; has adapted the OASIS OpenDocument format
as native file format.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="featurekde">
<title>&kde; Features</title>
<para>
Since &calligra; builds on &kde; all the features you would expect from a
&kde; application are also available in &calligra;. This includes &DBus;, KParts, Flake, 
Desktop Integration, Configurability and so on. All this makes the look and
feel of &calligra; very familiar and really integrates &calligra; into the
desktop environment, thus allowing seamless workflows.
</para>
</sect2>

</sect1>

</chapter>

<chapter id="configuration">
<title>Configuring &calligra; and Your System</title>

<para>
While &calligra; should work quite nice out of the box, there may well be
some things to optimize to get the best out of &calligra;. This chapter
shows you what you might want to do to achieve the best results with
your new office suite and make it suite your needs. &calligra; is
highly configurable, even down to detailed toolbar and menu layout.
</para>

<sect1 id="custom-gui">
<title>Customizing the &calligra; &GUI;</title>

<para>
While &calligra; comes out of the box with a &GUI; (graphical user interface)
that should suit most people's needs, there are good reasons why you may
want to change the way the programs look.
</para>

<para>
My mother, for example, is a bit afraid of buttons and menu entries she
doesn't understand. To tailor &calligra; to her needs, I reduced the
&GUI; to a bare minimum of functionality. As she only needs to write
letters and use certain templates, there is no need for much more
functionality than saving, loading, printing, &etc;
</para>

<para> Thanks to the <quote>action</quote> concept of &Qt; and &kde;,
you can freely customize &calligra; menubars and tool
bars. Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no easy-to-use dialogs
to do this. &calligra; stores its &GUI; configuration in &XML; files
and you'll have to edit those. Hopefully, this situation will change
in the future; for now, you'll need some basic knowledge of how an
&XML; document works (or &HTML;, which is a subset of
&XML;). <!--The <quote>action</quote> concept needs to be discussed in
  more detail -->  </para>

<para>
Normally, each &calligra; application has at least two of those &XML;
files: one describing the &GUI; of the shell (basically, that's what you
see if there is no document open) and one describing the &GUI; of the
respective part (that's what you see normally). For example, for
&words;, these two &XML; files are named
<filename>calligra_shell.rc</filename> and <filename>words.rc</filename>.
</para>

<para> 
Here's a simple example of such an rc-file.
</para>

<example>
<title>An example of a simple rc-file</title>
<screen>
&lt;!DOCTYPE QConfig &gt;&lt;qconfig&gt;
&lt;menubar&gt;
&lt;menu name="Edit"&gt;&lt;text&gt;Edit&lt;/text&gt;
&lt;action name="edit_cut"/&gt;
&lt;action name="edit_copy"/&gt;
&lt;action name="edit_paste"/&gt;
&lt;separator/&gt;
&lt;action name="edit_find"/&gt;
&lt;/menu&gt;
&lt;menu name="Insert"&gt;&lt;text&gt;Insert&lt;/text&gt;
&lt;action name="insert_picture"/&gt;
&lt;action name="insert_clipart"/&gt;
&lt;menu name="Variable"&gt;&lt;text&gt;Variable&lt;/text&gt;
&lt;action name="insert_var_datefix"/&gt;
&lt;action name="insert_var_datevar"/&gt;
&lt;/menu&gt;
&lt;/menu&gt;
&lt;/menubar&gt;
&lt;toolbars&gt;
&lt;toolbar name="edit_toolbar" position="right"&gt;
&lt;action name="edit_cut"/&gt;
&lt;action name="edit_copy"/&gt;
&lt;action name="edit_paste"/&gt;
&lt;/toolbar&gt;
&lt;/toolbars&gt;
&lt;/qconfig&gt;
</screen>
</example>

</sect1>

</chapter>

<chapter id="more-info">
<title>How to get more information</title>

<sect1 id="other-manuals">
<title>Other &calligra; manuals</title>

<para>
For detailed information on the different &calligra; applications, please
consult their respective manuals.  <!-- (use ulink to help:/appname/ -->
<!-- for the meantime - it's a hack, but it's the best we have -->
<!-- presently. [FIXME: how do I provide links to them? Do we --> 
<!-- need set-tag?] --> 
</para>

</sect1>

<sect1 id="links">
<title>Links</title>

<para>
The following links should be useful if you're looking for more information
about &kde; or &calligra;.
</para>

<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para><ulink url="http://calligra.org">The &calligra;
homepage</ulink>. Here you can find information on how to get and
install &calligra;, news about &calligra; development, screenshots &etc;
</para></listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="http://www.kde.org">The &kde; Homepage</ulink>. &kde; is the most advanced and 
absolutely free desktop environment for unix-like operating systems. 
&calligra; makes use of the &kde; libraries.
</para></listitem>
<listitem>
<para><ulink url="http://qt-project.org/">&Qt; page</ulink>. The creators
of the C++-toolkit &Qt;. &kde; and &calligra; make use of &Qt;.
</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>

</sect1>

</chapter>

<chapter id="programmersinfo">
<title>Programming &calligra;</title>

<sect1 id="programmingintro">
<title>Introduction</title>
<para>
If you want to do &calligra; development, the following resources might
be of interest:
</para>

<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para> At <ulink
url="http://techbase.kde.org/Development">http://techbase.kde.org/Development</ulink> you'll
find many documents about programming with &Qt; and &kde;. You can find
the online version of the complete &kde; library documentation on 
<ulink url="http://api.kde.org/">KDE API Reference</ulink>
</para></listitem> 
<listitem><para>The first step for contributing code is to follow 
<ulink url="http://community.kde.org/Calligra/Building/Building_Calligra">those instructions</ulink> 
to get the source code and build it.
</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</sect1>

</chapter>

<chapter id="legal">
<title>Copyright and Licensing</title>

<para>
&calligra; is the result of the joint effort of many developers. Each source file
of &calligra; is copyrighted by the people who wrote this particular file and 
their names can be found at the start of each source file with the license that applies to 
that source file.
</para>

<para>
This manual is copyright by &Jost.Schenck;. It can be distributed
freely, as long as this copyright notice is included. You may change
it as long as you send me the changes or commit them to &kde;
<acronym>Git</acronym>.  I'll not be liable for anything resulting
from the use of this manual.
</para>

<para>
The other &calligra; manuals are copyrighted by their respective authors.
</para>

<!-- TRANS:CREDIT_FOR_TRANSLATORS -->
&underFDL;
&underGPL;

</chapter>

&documentation.index; 
</book>