Documents should represent the ‘coorperate identity’, which in small size firms probably comes down to printed stationary with a company logo and some other information on it. Kraft has to print  nicely on it. For that it is important that the layout can be configured at all and without compiling Kraft if the customer address should be printed fife millimeters higher for example.

Currently Kraft uses a document template written in RML for the layout. RML is a XML format which can be converted to PDF utilizing a python based command line tool which is called by Kraft. RML is a open source toolkit, quite powerful and mature. However, it does not solve all problems with flexible document creation and sometimes comes a bit unhandy. As a result our eyes are always open for alternatives.

Here are some requirements a template system must provide:

• There is a document template in the file system. It can be changed by the user without recompiling Kraft. Kraft picks it up, fills the document values in and processes it to PDF. Other output formats are optional.
• Layout: Areas where parts of the document are printed can be freely specified, ie. where the address, the date etc. is printed.
• Graphical elements like lines, fixed text, boxes, colors and images can be placed everywhere.
• The system knows at least different layouts for the first page, middle pages and the last page.
• All pages have page header and footer.
• Loops: Since an invoice for example has an unknown amount of items the system must be able to handle that, including clever space management with  pagebreaks. Nested loops are possible.
• Maintain areas which must not be split, i.e. an invoice item should be printed completely on one page and not be split by a pagebreak.
• Text faces, paragraph alignment, width, spacing and these kind of things must be configurable in the template.
• Some variables are available such as a page counter.
• Really great would be if the system provides carryover of calculations, like  on the top and bottom of each page the so far accumulated sum is printed.

Which free layouting and PDF generating system is able to provide that, preferably Qt/KDE based? Kugar was striving to solve it but when I tested it it did not work out.

Another idea is to use the ability of KWord to work with templates. If Kraft could read KWord templates, fill them and automatically generate a KWord doc from it, that would be a great solution, because in addition to automatic PDF generation documents could easily be exported as KWord docs and changed manually if needed. A great ‘template editor’ also would be available. This would in the direction of office suit integration that commercial Kraft competitors nowadays have.

I am not sure how far we are away from that. Something to investigate.

The best thing is that an additional developer works on Kraft: After my last status post Thomas Richard (account trichard) contacted me that he is interested, next days I had the first patch in my mailbox and from that point of time on he constantly contributed high quality changes into the Kraft repository.

His high energy, dedication and fresh ideas gave me a new motivation push after having worked on Kraft basically alone for more than four years. That’s great!

The last months we worked on porting Kraft to the KDE4 platform which is in a quite good shape in SVN already: Kraft compiles without warnings and without Q3 and K3 support classes and works stable again.

We couldn’t resist to make use of the new capabilities of KDE4 here and there and as a result we have a few small feature updates as well. The most interesting might be that the first KDE4 Kraft version will additionally support a sqlite database backend which eases setup and configuration for users tremendously.

Following our friends from the KMyMoney project we will come up with a first Kraft-on-KDE4 beta soon. Please stay tuned.

now out: kde4-skrooge 0.2.7. Published in openSUSE:Factory:Contrib and KDE:KDE4:Community.

How to add the similar function to KDE 4 so we could compress some file or folder, or extract a zip file both in Dolphin and Konqueror ? Here is the tips :

1. Download the plugin here :
   http://www.kde-apps.org/content/download.php?content=84206&id=1&tan=96989998
2. Open konsole / terminal
3. Extract the plugin
4. Go to the extract folder
5. Copy all of .desktop file into /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus
6. Copy the content of script folder into /usr/bin
7. Test with dolphin or kde4

The above tips will make a system wide configuration. If you wish to make a local changes, just execute INSTALL_1.0.sh on the extract folder.

NOTE : The programs p7zip, bunzip2, bzip2, gzip, rar, unrar, tar, zip and unzip must be installed.

I don’t know if the function will be added into KDE 4.1 by default, but I hope so

I tried beta 3 on Satuday, and having a problem while running KDE LiveCD. The LiveCD failed run with an error exception : “Failed mounting Read Only File System”. I think it was a problem with my testing computer, so I take another machine which ended with same result.

I think I would like to post the error on mailing list but I decided to wait an installation testing with DVD iso. on Beta 1 I’ve an issue with LiveCD installation but the DVD iso is worked without problem, so I think it would rather LiveCD problem than beta 3 problem in general.

In Satuday evening I tried KDE Live on VMWare environment before playing with the DVD iso. Surprised, it was worked flawlessly, running well without problem including Live installation. I don’t know why the LiveCD worked without problem on VMWare workstation but having problem on physical machine. I assumes that it would like the problem with the iso burned on CD, not with iso itself, so I take another blank disc and burned the kde live iso once again.

The second burned kde live iso worked without problem too, so the conclusion is the problem with the quality of the first burned CD

Today, I give the beta 3 testing on my testing PC at work. As noticed by Coolo in beta 3 announcement, the live installation running well without problem. I most likely using live installation than the DVD install because the live install is more faster and just need a few question (used default setting). The different approach between DVD install and live install is about the flexibility of installation setting. The live install produce more faster because it’s used the default setting, with standard option.

Anyway, Here is a short of summary of beta 3 from my own perspective :

1. LiveCD is much better than previous one and looks pretty stable for production used. As mentioned on the announcement, it’s not recommended for production use but if you like it, you can used with your own risk . I used beta 3 on my personal laptop and openSUSE 10.3 with KDE 4 on my work computer
2. Beta 3 better polished than 10.3 but the polished not really complete. I like the login interface although in my personal mind, Mandriva 2008.1 login form is better polished . The polished interface not only in login form but also in installation setting and some application, ie : on OpenOffice. I think the polished Open Office splash screen need an update and some artwork. Black splash screen with a small bird is less nicer than Open Office splash screen on 10.2
3. Beta 3 come with KDE 4.0.4, Firefox 3 beta 5, Open Office 2.4.0.10 and some of updated component. Everything seems to worked without problem. I’m experienced with KDE4 problem on shut down process (crash of plasma) but I think it’s the problem with KDE 4 because I got same error with KDE 4 on openSUSE 10.3
4. Zypper package manager is much faster and has becoming my default package manager. With delta-rpm support and increasing speed capability, I’m quite satisfied with zypper and personally encourage for Indonesian openSUSE lover in next meeting.
5. Beta 3 successfully detected my graphical driver although it come with 800X600 default setting, but hey, I could used KRandR to change the setting into 1024X768 without confused problem : “Your X server is using the RandR extension at version 1.2 or greater which doesn’t have any configuration yet” as shown in 10.3
6. The big problem with beta 3 is about ath5k wireless driver. It was successfully detected my Atheros AR5212 (D-Link Wireless Card) but I could not connect to my Access Point with KNetworkManager or standard ifup. I can bring it up after disabling ath5k driver and used standard madwifi driver (madwifi.tar.gz version 0.9.4, with make, make install and modprobe ath_pci. Installation how-to in Bahasa Indonesia, here and here). I have same problem with Beta 1 and Beta 2
7. Wireless LAN Network Manager come with the auto detect hotspot without any “scan” button or something like that. I would personally encourage to add the button to make sure that we can refresh the hotspot list rather than waiting for nothing scanned

With all of nice feature on openSUSE 11.0 beta 3, we hope 11.0 will be released on June 19 2008 with bunch of nice features.

Related Entries :

1. Screenshot of 11.0 beta 3 live installation setting
2. openSUSE 11.0 beta 3 announcement