Calligra

Calligra is an open source office suite solution for Linux/BSD-based operating systems. It is similar to the LibreOffice application and provides users with many attractive components for all of their office tasks. We should call this software a “phoenix” as it was reborn from the ashes of the discontinued KOffice office suite, which was distributed alongside the well known KDE desktop environment.

One of the most complex office suites

It appears to be the most complex office suite available on the Linux platform, as it comprises numerous components, including the famous Krita digital painting tool and the usual spreadsheets, words and presentation apps. In alphabetical orders, the main components of Calligra are: Braindump, Flow, Karbon, Kexi, Krita, Plan, Stage, Sheets, and Words.

Included tools

Braindump is a mind map tool that helps you to dump and organize ideas, text, drawings, images, etc. Flow is an flowcharting and diagramming application, Karbon is a vector drawing tool, and Kexi is a visual database builder.

In addition, Krita is a professional-grade digital painting and sketching application, Plan is a project management tool, Stage is a presentation app, Sheets is a feature-rich spreadsheet and calculation tool, and Words is the word processing tool.

Designed for KDE

The best part of the Calligra office suite is that all of its components can be installed separately. On the other hand, the worse part is that it requires many of the libraries and core packages of the KDE desktop environment, which might be annoying for GNOME or Xfce users.

Supported operating systems

Preliminary support or the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating system has been added in the latest release, offering a free office suite to all users of these proprietary computing platforms. If you use KDE and Linux, and you need more than LibreOffice can offer, then you should download and install the Calligra office suite. It can be easily installed from the default software repositories of major Linux OSes, such as Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Kubuntu, or Gentoo.

What is new in this release:

• General:
• Fix crash in move command when using arrow keys
• Respect container boundaries when moving shapes by arrow keys
• Remove shape manipulation handles when the tool is deactivated
• Always display shapes in the the same order in the ‘Add shape' docker
• Sheets:
• Improve formatting of scientific numbers
• Fix save/load of cell borders
• Plan:
• Bug 376469: Bad month calendar in Work & Vacation
• Day numbers where not initialized correctly.
• Manually entered dates where not parsed correctly.
• Use default currency symbol if the currency symbol is not explicitly set
• Chart:
• Fix crash when chart type is changed
• Fix crash when a chart component is deleted
• Fix crash when x- or y-axis is removed
• Fix ui when editing axis label
• Limit moving chart components to chart boundaries
• Fix edit font dialog: Keep the axis fonts QFont size in sync with
• KCharts fontSize
• Fix save/load of axis label font size and font family
• Save/load legend alignment flags
• Do not save axis label if it is not visible
• Always do legend alignment when legend becomes visible.
• Make axis dimensions translatable
• Add undo command for hide/show titles
• Add undo command for add/remove axis
• Respect margins/spacing
• Handle resizing in a reasonable way

What is new in version :

• General:
• Fix crash in move command when using arrow keys
• Respect container boundaries when moving shapes by arrow keys
• Remove shape manipulation handles when the tool is deactivated
• Always display shapes in the the same order in the ‘Add shape' docker
• Sheets:
• Improve formatting of scientific numbers
• Fix save/load of cell borders
• Plan:
• Bug 376469: Bad month calendar in Work & Vacation
• Day numbers where not initialized correctly.
• Manually entered dates where not parsed correctly.
• Use default currency symbol if the currency symbol is not explicitly set
• Chart:
• Fix crash when chart type is changed
• Fix crash when a chart component is deleted
• Fix crash when x- or y-axis is removed
• Fix ui when editing axis label
• Limit moving chart components to chart boundaries
• Fix edit font dialog: Keep the axis fonts QFont size in sync with
• KCharts fontSize
• Fix save/load of axis label font size and font family
• Save/load legend alignment flags
• Do not save axis label if it is not visible
• Always do legend alignment when legend becomes visible.
• Make axis dimensions translatable
• Add undo command for hide/show titles
• Add undo command for add/remove axis
• Respect margins/spacing
• Handle resizing in a reasonable way

What is new in version 3.0.0.1:

• A number of fixes for charts (review 122153).

What is new in version 3.0.0:

• A number of fixes for charts (review 122153).

What is new in version 2.9.6:

• General:
• Fix building on CentOS and Windows
• Fix Collapse button in docker titlebar shown even if set to uncollapsable
• Fix saving of sections inside tables
• Fix "keep lines together" check box in paragraph check box
• Restore loading of default styles (ODF's defaultstyles.xml) and make it work when multiple document types are used in the very same application (for example in Gemini).
• Fix disappearing blocks during relayouts. Symptoms would be that the block would appear and reappear depending on both pages being layouted or not (bug 345621)
• Make sure the cursor is correct when hovering the corner handles of a shape (bug 347843)
• Fix preset docker flickering and slowdown (related to bug 344968)
• Make sure the footnote styles are found and that the footnote number (in the footnote itself) is present in the right baseline (using the correct footnote style when creating a new footnote is a bit problematic though, LibreOffice doesn't see to actually save the style) (bug 323232)
• Don't delete when at the end of table cell (bug 346297)
• Fix an issue where some config files may not be picked up
• Kexi:
• Fix renames for file storing the Welcome status bar's GUIs
• Recent Projects: use file's base name as a good replacement for caption when caption is not available
• Fix left margin for the global search box (dependent on style); also react on changing widget style
• Fix possible crash caused by command line arguments passed to Kexi in a wrong way
• Fix crash appearing when the -hide-menu command line option is used
• Queries:
• Fix possible crash in result handling of queries
• SQLite databases:
• Fix compacting databases (properly rename files back to the original name)
• PostgreSQL databases:
• Fix crash when importing a PostgreSQL database to a .kexi file (bug 349156)
• Krita:
• Add possibility to continue a Crop Tool action
• Speed up of color balance, desaturate, dodge, hsv adjustment, index color per-channel and posterize filters.
• Activate Cut/Copy Sharp actions in the menu
• Implemented continuation of the transform with clicking on canvas
• new default workspace
• Add new shortcuts (‘' opens the tool options, f5 opens the brush editor, f7 opens the preset selector.)
• Show the tool options in a popup (toggle this on or off in the general preferences, needs restarting Krita)
• Add three new default shortcuts (Create group layer = Ctrl+G, Merge Selected layer = Ctrl+Alt+E, Scale image to new size = Alt+Ctrl+I )
• Add an ‘hide pop-up on mouseclick option' to advanced color selector.
• Make brush ‘speed' sensor work properly
• Allow preview for "Image Background Color and Transparency" dialog.
• Selection modifier patch is finally in! (shift=add, alt=subtract, shift+alt=intersect, ctrl=replace. Path tool doesn't work yet, and they can't be configured yet)
• Bug fixes:
• Fix crash when saving a pattern to a *.kra (bug 346932)
• Make Group Layer return correct extent and exact bounds when in pass-through mode
• Make fixes to pass-through mode.
• Added an optional optimization to slider spin box
• Fix node activating on the wrong image (bug 348599)
• Fix deleting a color in the palette docker (bug 349792)
• Fix scale to image size while adding a file layer (bug 349823)
• Fix wrapping issue for all dial widgets in Layer Styles dialog
• Fix calculation of y-res when loading .kra files
• Prevent a divide by zero (bug 349598)
• Reset cursor when canvas is extended to avoid cursor getting stuck in "pointing hand" mode (bug 347800)
• Fix tool options visibility by default (bug 348730)
• Fix issue where changing theme doesn't update user config (bug 349446)
• Fix internal brush name of LJF smoke (bug 348451)
• Set documents created from clipboard to modified (bug 349424)
• Make more robust: check pointers before use (bug 349451)
• Use our own code to save the merged image for kra and ora (is faster)
• Fix Hairy brush not to paint black over transparent pixels in Soak Ink mode (bug 313296)
• Fix PVS warning in hairy brush
• Don't limit the allowed dock areas (bug 348750)
• Fix uninitialized m_maxPresets (bug 348795)
• (gmic) Try to workaround the problem with busy cursor
• (gmic) If there is selection, do not synchronize image size (bug 349346)
• Disable autoscroll for the fill-tool as well (bug 348887)
• Rename the fill layers (bug 348914)
• Calligra Plan
• Restore option to add items to reports in Plan's report designer
• Fix and update background app icon in Plan about HTML view
• Calligra Words
• Fix crash appearing sometimes with page breaks, and make page breaks work correctly on multi-column pages
• Handle column breaks
• Fix regressions that made floating text shapes geometry protected (bug 345426)
• Fix a crash on closing a second document (bug 336145)

What is new in version 2.9.4:

• General:
• Re-enable Review and References features that were disabled by mistake
• Fix crash after showing "Insert Bibliography" second time (bug 335458)
• Fix bug "Can't change footnotes style" (bug 303489)
• Do not crash when reducing number of columns on page (bug 322429)
• Do not crash after selecting more than one table and pressing Ctrl+C (bug 330284)
• Kexi:
• General:
• Fix error when configuring Calligra (related to the Marble maps component) (bug 345318)
• Forms & Table views:
• Make combo-boxes in table and form views show just one column (bug 345631)
• Fix displaying records in data aware combo boxes (bug 345350)
• Forms:
• Fix crash when removing elements in the object tree (bug 345336)
• Krita:
• Don't show the zoom level on-canvas message while loadidng
• Fix initialization of the multi-brush axis
• Add some more kickstarter backers to the about box
• Fix memory leak when loading presets (and a bunch more memory leaks)
• Fix crashes related to progress reporting when running a g'mic action
• Add a toggle button to hide/show the filter selection tree in the filter dialog
• Fix a focus bug that made it hard to edit e.g. layer names when activating the editor in the docker with a tablet stylus
• Fix geometry of the toolbox on startup in some cases
• Fix lock proportions in the free transform tool when locking aspect ratio
• Add an option to hide the docker titlebars
• Update the resource manager lists after loading a resource bundle
• Make the resource manager look for bundles by default
• Make the eraser end of the stylus erase by default
• Make krita remember the presets chosen for each stylus and stylus end
• Make Krita start faster by only loading images for the references docker when the references docker is visible
• Fix a crash in the g'mic docker when there's no preview widget selected
• On switching images, show the selected layer in the layer box, not the bottom one
• Show the selected monitor profile in the color management settings page instead of the default one
• Make the Image Split dialog select the right export file type.
• Fix saving and loading masks for file layers
• Make the default MDI background darker
• Fix loading some older .kra files that contained an image name with a number after a /
• Don't crash if the linux colord colormanager cannot find a color-managed output device
• Clean the code following a number of PVS studio code analyzer warnings
• Add tooltips to the presets in the popup palette
• Fix a problem where brush presets in the popup palette were sometimes misaligned
• Calligra Words:
• Fix a crash on Format page (bug 345273)
• Fix memory leaks
• Make line number of cursor (statusbar) count lines of text instead of hard breaks (bug 298365)
• Many fixes for sections

What is new in version 2.8.7 / 2.9 Beta 2:

• Kexi - Visual Database Applications Builder:
• General:
• New: Add dedicated support for "Breeze" icon theme of Plasma 5.
• Newly created project now does not use window of previously opened project. We're starting a new Kexi instance now. (bug 340768)
• Make the project navigator more modern, a move towards Plasma 5. Tastes best with the Breeze style and icon theme.
• Table view:
• New: Port tabular views (data grids) to Qt 4's scroll area, a milestone leading to Qt 5-based Kexi.
• New: Display "key" icon in primary key columns.
• Hide the "+" button in record navigator when inserting is off (e.g. in read-only mode or in queries).
• Queries:
• Added "BETWEEN...AND" SQL operator support. (wish 331615)
• Reports:
• New: Add "Interleaved 2 of 5" barcodes support (a port from OpenRPT). (wish 341473)
• New: Add "Value" property for consistency to report items (check, field, text, barcode) providing contain data that is displayed when the item isn't bound to a database field.
• Fix possible hang in text report item.
• Krita - Digital Painting for Artists:
• Fixes and improvements with how actions and shortcuts are managed. This will help fix a lot of shortcut conflicts that existed in the past. Actions and functionality are smarter now as well. This means that buttons and menu items will be disabled/enabled when they are not available. (eg. You cannot change the canvas size if there is no documents open).
• add drag and drop when there are no documents open
• make the background configurable with a color or image (located in Settings > Configure Krita)
• fixed a lot of multiple document bugs
• rename "hairy" brush engine to "bristle" brush engine
• add "flatten" action to layer context menu
• PDF export - landscape and portrait now work correctly
• initial tool when loaded is freehand brush
• don't show menu icons unless you are using KDE
• added a lot of presets for color profiles from Elle Stone
• fix handling of locked dockers behaves better when changing workspaces
• make it possible to convert images using ‘krita -export bla.png -export-filename bla.jpg'
• fix crash when mergine a multi-selection of layers that includes a group layer
• Removed the selection brush; use the global selection mask and the regular brush tools instead
• Make krita open new images in the current window
• On Linux: use colord to get the system monitor profile, and make the system monitor profiles work in a multi-monitor setup
• Fix the layout of the filter and filter layer dialogs.
• Make it possible to use different OpenColorIO settings for each canvas
• Improve startup speed on all platforms
• Mirror axis tools now follow the rotation of the canvas
• fix rotation in brush preview
• fixed loading assistants
• fixed toggling of painting assistants
• improve how the color slider widget is used
• resource bundle fixes with paint operations, loading tags, and double loading resources
• prevent loading corrupt resource bundles (added MD5 Checksums)
• fix lockup with perspective assistants
• improve the color smudge brush engine so it doesn't darken too much
• lots of fixes for working with resource bundles
• bug fixes when selecting shapes
• fixed some computer systems that weren't loading preset bundles correctly
• fixed color selector crashes when no document open
• fix switching between landscape and portrait orientation
• lots of fixes with handling multiple open images and the dockers
• update gmic to version 1.6.0.3
• enable interactive filters like colorize [interactive]
• implement progress reporting when applying filter
• if gmic script fails, inform user about the error message
• fixed lost filtering when you select filter and click ok
• fixed a bunch of multi-document specific issues
• fixes when selecting colors with the advanced color selector
• brush sizes are back to having 2 decimals to prevent issues
• fixed a few bugs related to the crop tool with properties and resetting
• fixed saving split alpha mask
• fixed a lot of bugs in the dirty presets feature
• fixed mirror tool working with shapes like circles and rectangles
• fix shaky lines on 32-bit systems when using canvas rotation
• fixes to the cage transform tool
• Improve handles for the transform tool
• fixes to the opacity slider
• fixes to the tablet handling (make working with vector shapes with the tablet possible again)
• make the liquify tool handle build-up/wash mode properly
• new color smudge presets
• Fix a bunch memory leaks and double deletions
• Fix crash when adding drop shadow effect
• Fix crash when closing a document while moving the stylus
• Fix the opengl canvas for some (notably AMD drivers). More fixes coming up!
• updated layout for resource manager
• mirror tools have updated UI
• G'MIC has been moved to filters in the menu
• Resource manager has moved to settings
• "Size Canvas to Size of Current Layer" is renamed to "Trim to Current Layer" and "Size Canvas to Size of Selection" is renamed to "Trim to Selection"
• Lots of warnings fixed that only show up with clang, quite a few of which unconvered real bugs.
• Fix thumbnailing for .kra and .ora files
• Add a shortcut to toggle the assistants on and off
• Fix pasting text in a multi-line text shape
• Calligra Plan - Project Management:
• Make icons match the proper size.
• Calligra Sheets - The Spreadsheet:
• Speed up drawing of complex documents
• Updated default currency to Euro for Lithuania
• Do not crash in the table shape when the external editor is not available
• Fix up mouse interaction with the table shape
• Fix a problem with non-native files not being openable
• Fix sorting to properly update formulas instead of discarding them
• Fix Find/Replace to not skip the last row
• Fix a deadlock within a COUPNUM function

What is new in version 2.9 Beta:

• New Features and Improvements in This Release:
• New Integration: Displaying office documents in Okular:
• Calligra document plugin for Okular:
• Calligra document plugin for Okular showing a DOC file
• A new plugin for Okular, KDE's universal document viewer, enables Okular to use the Calligra office engine for displaying documents in the formats OpenDocument Text (ODT), MS Word (DOC, DOCX) and WordPerfect (WPD). It supplements the existing plugin from Calligra that gives Okular ability to display OpenDocument Presentation (ODP) and MS Powerpoint (PPT, PPTX) formats.
• The Calligra office engine has been used for the default document viewers on the smartphones Nokia N9 and Jolla, the Android app COffice, and other mobile editions of Calligra. So it makes sense to also use the Calligra office engine for the document reader from KDE, coming with a UI designed for document consumption for people who want to read, but not edit office documents.
• New application: Calligra Gemini:
• Calligra Gemini debuts in 2.9, a novel application encasing word processor and presentation Calligra components can function both as a traditional desktop application used with a mouse and keyboard, and transform into a touch friendly application on the go. This changes the experience to one suitable for all-touch devices without the inconvenience of having to switch to a separate application. Read more about story behind the app.
• Kexi - Visual Database Applications Builder:
• Many usability improvements and bug fixes. Forms have finally been ported from Qt 3 to Qt 4.
• General:
• New: Simplify and automatize bug reporting; OS and Platform information is auto-selected on bugs.kde.org.
• New: Make side panes lighter by removing frames in all styles except Oxygen
• New: Added "Close all tabs" action to main window tabs.
• Improve appearance of main tabbed toolbar for GTK+ and Oxygen styles. (bug 341150)
• Improve handling permission errors on database creation. Do not allow to create a new SQLite-based .kexi file if: non-writable folder is selected, relative path is selected (unsafe), non-file path is selected (perhaps a folder).
• Do not crash when Kexi is unable to find plugins; display message and exit.
• Fix right-to-left user interface support in side panes.
• Simplify "Save password" checkbox text in database connection editor and add direct what's this button.
• Disable ability of setting left/right sidebars floatable (like in Dolphin, improve stability)
• Remove redundant ‘find' action from the main toolbar. It's already available in local context where it really works.
• Move the ‘Export data table' from the main toolbar to a local table and query object's menu.
• Improve user-visible messages.
• Forms:
• New: Port Kexi Forms to Qt4's scroll area, a milestone leading to Qt5-based Kexi.
• Improve translation support in Forms' action selection dialog
• Reports:
• New: Added inline editing for labels in Report Designer.
• New: Added "Do you want to open exported document?" question when report is exported to a Text/Spreadsheet/as Web Page.
• Print reports in High DPI (precision). (bug 340598)
• Krita - Creative Sketching & Painting App:
• New: Krita can now open multiple images in one window
• New: Perspective transform
• New: Liquify transform
• New: Cage transform
• New: Selection-shaped gradients
• New: Several new filters
• New: A HSV color selector
• New: It's now possible to edit the alpha channel separately
• New: A new feature to split a layer into several layers by color
• Thin line quality has been improved
• Anti-aliasing of the transform tool has been improved
• It's now much easier to create masks and convert between masks and layers
• Vector object scaling and resolution has been fixed
• The smudge brush has been made more correct
• Steps on the Undo history can now be merged
• The brush preset system has been improved to make it possible to temporarily lock changes to a preset during a session
• The G'Mic filter has been updated and there are previews now
• Missing: Photoshop layer styles and PSD layer masks: we're working hard on those, but they aren't done yet. We're working to have them ready by the end of January. The animation tool has been disabled for refactoring. In Beta 1, Sketch and Gemini have been disabled.
• Calligra Words - Word Processor:
• Layouting has been reworked to fix many small rendering glitches. It is the first required step before more page layouting features can be added as well as dynamic page layout changes.