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0001 <?xml version="1.0" ?>
0002 <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//KDE//DTD DocBook XML V4.5-Based Variant V1.1//EN" "dtd/kdedbx45.dtd" [
0003  <!ENTITY sheets "<application>Calligra Sheets</application>">
0004  <!ENTITY words "<application>Calligra Words</application>">
0005  <!ENTITY stage "<application>Calligra Stage</application>">
0006  <!ENTITY flow "<application>Calligra Flow</application>">
0007  <!ENTITY plan "<application>Calligra Plan</application>">
0008  <!ENTITY karbon "<application>Calligra Karbon</application>">
0009  <!ENTITY calligra "Calligra">
0010  <!ENTITY kappname "&calligra;">
0011  <!ENTITY package "Calligra">
0012  <!ENTITY % addindex "IGNORE">
0013  <!ENTITY % English "INCLUDE" > <!-- change language only here -->
0014 ]>
0015 
0016 <!-- maintained by raphael.langerhorst@kdemail.net -->
0017 
0018 <book id="calligra" lang="&language;">
0019 <bookinfo>
0020 <title>&calligra;</title>
0021 <subtitle>A General Introduction</subtitle>
0022 <authorgroup>
0023 <author>
0024 &Raphael.Langerhorst; &Raphael.Langerhorst.mail;
0025 </author>
0026 <author>
0027 &Jost.Schenck; &Jost.Schenck.mail;
0028 </author>
0029 <!-- TRANS:ROLES_OF_TRANSLATORS -->
0030 </authorgroup>
0031 
0032 <date>2012-01-03</date>
0033 <releaseinfo>2.4.0</releaseinfo>
0034 
0035 <abstract>
0036 <para>
0037 &calligra; is a graphic art and office suite by &kde;.
0038 </para>
0039 </abstract>
0040 
0041 <keywordset>
0042 <keyword>KDE</keyword>
0043 <keyword>Calligra</keyword>
0044 </keywordset>
0045 
0046 </bookinfo>
0047 
0048 
0049 <chapter id="introduction">
0050 <title>Introduction</title>
0051 <sect1>
0052 <title>&calligra; components</title>
0053 
0054 <important> <para>Please check <ulink url="http://docs.kde.org/development/en/calligra/calligra/index.html">http://docs.kde.org</ulink>
0055 for updated versions of this document.</para></important>
0056 
0057 <para>
0058 &calligra; is a graphic art and office suite by &kde;.
0059 &calligra; consists of the following components:
0060 </para>
0061 
0062 <itemizedlist>
0063 <listitem><para>&words; (a frames-based wordprocessor)</para></listitem>
0064 <listitem><para>&sheets; (a spreadsheet application)</para></listitem> 
0065 <listitem><para>&stage; (screen and slide presentations)</para></listitem>
0066 <listitem><para>&flow; (a flowchart application)</para></listitem>
0067 <listitem><para>&karbon; (a vector drawing application)</para></listitem>
0068 <listitem><para>&plan; (a project management application)</para></listitem>
0069 </itemizedlist>
0070 
0071 <para>
0072 Because these components use Flake technology, &calligra;
0073 components are designed to work very well with each other. Many &calligra;
0074 component can be embedded in another &calligra; document. For instance, you
0075 can insert a spreadsheet which you created in &sheets; directly into a &words;
0076 document. In this way, complex, compound documents can be created using
0077 &calligra;.
0078 </para>
0079 
0080 <para>
0081 A plugin mechanism makes it easy to extend the functionality of
0082 &calligra;. You will find many plugins in some of the components
0083 and can learn how to write plugins yourself.
0084 </para>
0085 
0086 <para>
0087 This manual only covers the general features of &calligra;, those that
0088 are common to most or all components in the suite. For detailed information
0089 about the different components, have a look at the respective manual.
0090 </para>
0091 
0092 </sect1>
0093 
0094 <sect1 id="features">
0095 <title>Overview of &calligra; features</title>
0096 <sect2 id="featureintegration">
0097 <title>Integration</title>
0098 <para>
0099 &calligra; provides a framework that all components build on. Through
0100 this framework high integration is achieved. It is possible to develop
0101 your own component that integrates as well. 
0102 </para>
0103 </sect2>
0104 <sect2 id="featureleightweight">
0105 <title>Lightweight</title>
0106 <para>
0107 Despite offering so many components, &calligra; is lightweight, fast and
0108 has a rather low memory footprint. This is also achieved because &calligra; builds
0109 on &kde;, a powerful application development framework.
0110 </para>
0111 <para>
0112 A goal of &calligra; is also to not overload the user interface with features
0113 that are hardly needed. This results in a lean and mean user interface that
0114 lets you do your work efficiently.
0115 </para>
0116 <para>
0117 Being lightweight can at times also mean that that very particular special
0118 functionality you need is not there. In this case you can always add the
0119 functionality yourself by extending &calligra;. Extra features can always be made available through
0120 additional plugins or scripts, thus keeping &calligra; itself lightweight.
0121 </para>
0122 </sect2>
0123 <sect2 id="featurecompleteness">
0124 <title>Completeness</title>
0125 <para>
0126 &calligra; offers a wide range of components, covering most of the home
0127 and business office needs. Additional features can always be implemented
0128 through scripts, plugins or even whole components based on the &calligra;
0129 framework.
0130 </para>
0131 </sect2>
0132 <sect2 id="featurefileformat">
0133 <title>OASIS OpenDocument Format</title>
0134 <para>
0135 It is a major importance for any office suite to adhere to established
0136 standards. Especially on the file format level to allow seamless document
0137 exchange with other office suites. This also avoids vendor lock-in, which
0138 is especially important for companies and also for individuals.
0139 </para>
0140 <para>
0141 For this reason &calligra; has adapted the OASIS OpenDocument format
0142 as native file format.
0143 </para>
0144 </sect2>
0145 <sect2 id="featurekde">
0146 <title>&kde; Features</title>
0147 <para>
0148 Since &calligra; builds on &kde; all the features you would expect from a
0149 &kde; application are also available in &calligra;. This includes &DBus;, KParts, Flake, 
0150 Desktop Integration, Configurability and so on. All this makes the look and
0151 feel of &calligra; very familiar and really integrates &calligra; into the
0152 desktop environment, thus allowing seamless workflows.
0153 </para>
0154 </sect2>
0155 
0156 </sect1>
0157 
0158 </chapter>
0159 
0160 <chapter id="configuration">
0161 <title>Configuring &calligra; and Your System</title>
0162 
0163 <para>
0164 While &calligra; should work quite nice out of the box, there may well be
0165 some things to optimize to get the best out of &calligra;. This chapter
0166 shows you what you might want to do to achieve the best results with
0167 your new office suite and make it suite your needs. &calligra; is
0168 highly configurable, even down to detailed toolbar and menu layout.
0169 </para>
0170 
0171 <sect1 id="custom-gui">
0172 <title>Customizing the &calligra; &GUI;</title>
0173 
0174 <para>
0175 While &calligra; comes out of the box with a &GUI; (graphical user interface)
0176 that should suit most people's needs, there are good reasons why you may
0177 want to change the way the programs look.
0178 </para>
0179 
0180 <para>
0181 My mother, for example, is a bit afraid of buttons and menu entries she
0182 doesn't understand. To tailor &calligra; to her needs, I reduced the
0183 &GUI; to a bare minimum of functionality. As she only needs to write
0184 letters and use certain templates, there is no need for much more
0185 functionality than saving, loading, printing, &etc;
0186 </para>
0187 
0188 <para> Thanks to the <quote>action</quote> concept of &Qt; and &kde;,
0189 you can freely customize &calligra; menubars and tool
0190 bars. Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no easy-to-use dialogs
0191 to do this. &calligra; stores its &GUI; configuration in &XML; files
0192 and you'll have to edit those. Hopefully, this situation will change
0193 in the future; for now, you'll need some basic knowledge of how an
0194 &XML; document works (or &HTML;, which is a subset of
0195 &XML;). <!--The <quote>action</quote> concept needs to be discussed in
0196   more detail -->  </para>
0197 
0198 <para>
0199 Normally, each &calligra; application has at least two of those &XML;
0200 files: one describing the &GUI; of the shell (basically, that's what you
0201 see if there is no document open) and one describing the &GUI; of the
0202 respective part (that's what you see normally). For example, for
0203 &words;, these two &XML; files are named
0204 <filename>calligra_shell.rc</filename> and <filename>words.rc</filename>.
0205 </para>
0206 
0207 <para> 
0208 Here's a simple example of such an rc-file.
0209 </para>
0210 
0211 <example>
0212 <title>An example of a simple rc-file</title>
0213 <screen>
0214 &lt;!DOCTYPE QConfig &gt;&lt;qconfig&gt;
0215 &lt;menubar&gt;
0216 &lt;menu name="Edit"&gt;&lt;text&gt;Edit&lt;/text&gt;
0217 &lt;action name="edit_cut"/&gt;
0218 &lt;action name="edit_copy"/&gt;
0219 &lt;action name="edit_paste"/&gt;
0220 &lt;separator/&gt;
0221 &lt;action name="edit_find"/&gt;
0222 &lt;/menu&gt;
0223 &lt;menu name="Insert"&gt;&lt;text&gt;Insert&lt;/text&gt;
0224 &lt;action name="insert_picture"/&gt;
0225 &lt;action name="insert_clipart"/&gt;
0226 &lt;menu name="Variable"&gt;&lt;text&gt;Variable&lt;/text&gt;
0227 &lt;action name="insert_var_datefix"/&gt;
0228 &lt;action name="insert_var_datevar"/&gt;
0229 &lt;/menu&gt;
0230 &lt;/menu&gt;
0231 &lt;/menubar&gt;
0232 &lt;toolbars&gt;
0233 &lt;toolbar name="edit_toolbar" position="right"&gt;
0234 &lt;action name="edit_cut"/&gt;
0235 &lt;action name="edit_copy"/&gt;
0236 &lt;action name="edit_paste"/&gt;
0237 &lt;/toolbar&gt;
0238 &lt;/toolbars&gt;
0239 &lt;/qconfig&gt;
0240 </screen>
0241 </example>
0242 
0243 </sect1>
0244 
0245 </chapter>
0246 
0247 <chapter id="more-info">
0248 <title>How to get more information</title>
0249 
0250 <sect1 id="other-manuals">
0251 <title>Other &calligra; manuals</title>
0252 
0253 <para>
0254 For detailed information on the different &calligra; applications, please
0255 consult their respective manuals.  <!-- (use ulink to help:/appname/ -->
0256 <!-- for the meantime - it's a hack, but it's the best we have -->
0257 <!-- presently. [FIXME: how do I provide links to them? Do we --> 
0258 <!-- need set-tag?] --> 
0259 </para>
0260 
0261 </sect1>
0262 
0263 <sect1 id="links">
0264 <title>Links</title>
0265 
0266 <para>
0267 The following links should be useful if you're looking for more information
0268 about &kde; or &calligra;.
0269 </para>
0270 
0271 <itemizedlist>
0272 <listitem>
0273 <para><ulink url="http://calligra.org">The &calligra;
0274 homepage</ulink>. Here you can find information on how to get and
0275 install &calligra;, news about &calligra; development, screenshots &etc;
0276 </para></listitem>
0277 <listitem>
0278 <para>
0279 <ulink url="http://www.kde.org">The &kde; Homepage</ulink>. &kde; is the most advanced and 
0280 absolutely free desktop environment for unix-like operating systems. 
0281 &calligra; makes use of the &kde; libraries.
0282 </para></listitem>
0283 <listitem>
0284 <para><ulink url="http://qt-project.org/">&Qt; page</ulink>. The creators
0285 of the C++-toolkit &Qt;. &kde; and &calligra; make use of &Qt;.
0286 </para></listitem>
0287 </itemizedlist>
0288 
0289 </sect1>
0290 
0291 </chapter>
0292 
0293 <chapter id="programmersinfo">
0294 <title>Programming &calligra;</title>
0295 
0296 <sect1 id="programmingintro">
0297 <title>Introduction</title>
0298 <para>
0299 If you want to do &calligra; development, the following resources might
0300 be of interest:
0301 </para>
0302 
0303 <itemizedlist>
0304 <listitem><para> At <ulink
0305 url="http://techbase.kde.org/Development">http://techbase.kde.org/Development</ulink> you'll
0306 find many documents about programming with &Qt; and &kde;. You can find
0307 the online version of the complete &kde; library documentation on 
0308 <ulink url="http://api.kde.org/">KDE API Reference</ulink>
0309 </para></listitem> 
0310 <listitem><para>The first step for contributing code is to follow 
0311 <ulink url="http://community.kde.org/Calligra/Building/Building_Calligra">those instructions</ulink> 
0312 to get the source code and build it.
0313 </para></listitem>
0314 </itemizedlist>
0315 </sect1>
0316 
0317 </chapter>
0318 
0319 <chapter id="legal">
0320 <title>Copyright and Licensing</title>
0321 
0322 <para>
0323 &calligra; is the result of the joint effort of many developers. Each source file
0324 of &calligra; is copyrighted by the people who wrote this particular file and 
0325 their names can be found at the start of each source file with the license that applies to 
0326 that source file.
0327 </para>
0328 
0329 <para>
0330 This manual is copyright by &Jost.Schenck;. It can be distributed
0331 freely, as long as this copyright notice is included. You may change
0332 it as long as you send me the changes or commit them to &kde;
0333 <acronym>Git</acronym>.  I'll not be liable for anything resulting
0334 from the use of this manual.
0335 </para>
0336 
0337 <para>
0338 The other &calligra; manuals are copyrighted by their respective authors.
0339 </para>
0340 
0341 <!-- TRANS:CREDIT_FOR_TRANSLATORS -->
0342 &underFDL;
0343 &underGPL;
0344 
0345 </chapter>
0346 
0347 &documentation.index; 
0348 </book>
0349