Just two weeks after the alpha arrived, a beta for version 2.6 of the Calligra project's set of open source productivity applications has been released with additional enhancements and new features that were not ready in time for the alpha. The beta is aimed at testers and includes general improvements to Open Document format handling, such as support for loading and saving 3D shapes and annotations; this should, the developers say, provide better interoperability with other office programs.

The Plan project management application now includes updated scheduling information and improved scheduling granularity, charts, project creation and report generator usability. Support for overwriting objects with the same name has been added to the Kexi visual database creator. Calligra Active, a QML-based version of Calligra aimed at tablets and smartphones, has been updated to include a new preview for text documents and a new search feature that works with all three Open Document formats, as well as support for translations. The user interface has been simplified and various bugs have also been addressed.



The Plan project planning application in action

Source: Calligra Project From now on no new features will be added to version 2.6 of the suite as the project's team shifts its focus only to fixing bugs in the beta ahead of the stable release. In addition to improving and adding new features to existing programs, the next major release of the KDE-oriented office suite will also be the first version to include a new writing program, called "Author", which was first announced in August. The application is designed to support the process of creating a new book from conception to its final publication. According to Calligra developer Inge Wallin, the final version of Calligra 2.6 is expected to arrive "within a month".

Labelled as version 2.5.91, the Calligra 2.6 Beta is available to download as a compressed source tarball ; alternatively, binaries for some distributions, including Arch Linux, Fedora, FreeBSD, openSUSE and Ubuntu, are also available. As with all beta releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. The latest stable version is Calligra 2.5.2 from mid-September, the second bug fix release of the 2.5 Calligra Suite.

(crve)