Kraft / News: Recent posts

Today the availability of Kraft Version 0.59 was announced.

It is another bugfix release for the 0.5x line of Kraft. It fixes some bugs in the calculation of the overall sums of documents with moved and deleted items, which are severe under certain circumstances.

Furthermore, the setup wizard got visible fixes in the database migration and also document copying was enhanced to take more from the original document. Also, if the doctype of an existing document is changed, Kraft now asks the user if the document ID should be changed as well.... read more

Herewith I like to announce Kraft version 0.58.

It is another bugfix release for the 0.5x line of Kraft. It fixes a severe bug in calculation of the VAT in printed documents. Apart from that, the character slash ('/') now can be used in numbercycle templates which did not work before.

In addition to that, I cleared the build process a bit and removed the libkraftcat from the build. The files are now all directly compiled into Kraft. The lib was never publically announced nor stable, or used at all, so there was no reason to keep it. Packaging is easier and more distribution conform now.... read more

Today the tarball kraft-0.57 was uploaded, please use that for all updates.

Code wise it is identically to 0.56 as it should be, but there have been broken tarballs around, so to be on the secure side, I released 0.57. Thanks.

I am happy to announce Kraft version 0.56 which was released today. This is the last bugfixing release for the 0.5x series. This releases fixes serious bugs of previous versions.

The send-by-email function now queries the receipient (prefered email) off the documents contact data, and also works properly again with the thunderbird mail client. Special item types in a document (on-demand or alternative items) can now be removed again from an item. Also the Ok/Cancel handling of the document editor window was fixed. If the document type of an existing document is changed, the doc ID is now reset from the document type specific number cycle. Apart from that, a couple of memory management hickups were repaired which lead even to crashes here and there.... read more

The Kraft team is happy to announce the availability of Kraft 0.54 today.

This version comes with an impressive list of new features and bug fixes. First and foremost, Kraft now supports another document type, which is the note of delivery. These kind of documents do not have prices on it, but just a list of articles which are going to be delivered. Kraft now comes with predefined document templates which allow to create these kind of documents.... read more

A bug in the 0.51 tarball made it necessary to release again and with another bug fix in the template catalog management here comes 0.53.

Please update!

I am happy to release Kraft 0.51 today. This is a bugfix release which brings a handful of useful bugfixes which were reported by Kraft users since the last release.

In the catalogue view, now drag and drop is working to rearrange templates. Removing of sub chapters is also working now. A bug in the unit handling was fixed that picked wrong units in some cases. The path to document templates is not utf8 save.... read more

In december 2012 the Kraft team proudly released version 0.50 of Kraft, the KDE software for easy business document management.

The most important change is that now multiple tax rates are supported within one document. That means that within e.g. one invoice items without tax, with reduced or full tax rate are supported. The sum calculation takes that in consideration properly. That makes Kraft an even more multi purpose software.... read more

A new version of Kraft, the KDE software to manage business documents in the small enterprise, was released in early november, 2011.

The new version 0.44 brought improvements with the Akonadi based addressbook integration as well as the template handling for header- and footer texts of documents.

A couple of days after the release of version 0.44 a severe bug forced the new release of version 0.45. Please skip 0.44 and go for 0.45 instead.... read more

The Kraft team is happy to announce the new stable version 0.40 of the KDE office software Kraft. After eleven month of porting work, Kraft 0.40 is the first version which is based on the KDE 4 software platform. Huge changes on the codebase of Kraft happened to benefit from the new technology of KDE 4.

Basically the new version equals the last KDE 3 version feature wise beside some changes which aim to make Kraft even more convenient to explore for unexperienced users. ... read more

Today the Kraft team is releasing the second beta for Kraft 0.40. A second beta was needed because meanwhile KDE 4.4 was released which comes with an Akonadi based addressbook. That is a big change compared to the old addressbook with a large impact on Kraft. Parts of Krafts addressbook integration had to be rewritten.

As a result Krafts setup assistant got another change compared to beta 1. It now also asks the user to mark his own address which is stored and used in the document generation. ... read more

We're happy that Kraft was accepted as a free software project at openExpo in Bern, Switzerland. This event, happening on march 24th and 25th has a focus on use of free software in the enterprise area.

We are sharing a booth with our friends from the KDE project and looking forward to seeing you visiting us and get a live demo of the latest Kraft for KDE 4.

[1] http://www.openexpo.ch/openexpo-2010-bern/

The Kraft team is happy to announce the first beta version of Kraft version 0.40. This is the first version of Kraft based on the KDE 4 platform. It is the result of a very long porting effort but has now reached a state where we can, after a short beta cycle, release a stable version of Kraft for KDE 4. It will be nearly feature equal to version 0.32 for KDE 3.

One of the new features of Kraft 0.40 makes the setup of Kraft easier. A file based data backend based on the popular sqlite database was added in addition to the mysql backend, so for evaluation no database setup work is required any more. Furthermore a setup wizard that guides new users through the setup process aims to make it easier for new and
unexperienced users.... read more

Kraft receives broader attention: A nice review article came out on Ghacks (www.ghacks.net), which is a very popular technology blog. Have fun reading http://tinyurl.com/ydsvfuw .

My favorite sentence: "Don’t let the simplicity of the interface fool you, Kraft is a powerful, useful tool."

The article reappeared on http://linuxtoday.com.

The Kraft team is currently working on the port of Kraft from the KDE3 to the KDE4 platform. That is a significant move but we're making good progress.

Expect a beta version soon for the KDE 4 platform, together with some nice feature adds.

The first openSUSE Conference ( see http://conference.opensuse.org/ ) is taking place from Sept. 17th to Sept. 20th 2009 in Nuremberg, Germany.

On the OpenDay, which aims especially to new users to free software, will be a talk about Kraft and free software in the office - all your questions will get answered! Don't miss it - we're looking forward to seeing you there.

I am happy to announce that there are three different Live Images (Live-CD, harddisk image and VMWare image) available.
Kraft is installed with all relevant tools and comes with some useful example data.

Booting this images gives you and your friends a good impression of how Kraft can help with the daily office work.

For details please see the anoucement on the mailinglist: https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=200906022032.57154.kraft%40freisturz.de

Kraft, the KDE software for people operating a small enterprise, has a new production release today. The Kraft team is happy to announce Kraft 0.32, the last release on the KDE 3 platform before porting to KDE 4 starts.

This release allows to edit the available document types, has a fixed tax system that is suitable for international use and brings way more flexibility in document number generation.
Furthermore, documents can be generated with a PDF watermark.

The Sourceforge Tracker is now open for Featurerequests and Bugs for Kraft. Please make use of it to add your wishes or report problems.

Submissions to the trackers are forwarded to the mailinglist kraft-user, so if you want to stay in touch consider to subscribe to the mailinglist.

I am happy to annouce Kraft version 0.31. Kraft 0.31 is a maintenance release which fixes the missing translations of version 0.30.

Additionally it brings two minor features:

1. Item Import: items can be imported into a document from file, e.g. a csv file. The format of the import file can be specified.

2. A read only document view was added, based on html output with a customizable look.

We are very happy to announce the availability of the Kraft version 0.30 'Proper Baby'. The new version brings, beside many bugfixes, two new features: Tagging and Discount Document Items.

Tagging means that all items of a document can be tagged out of a user defined list of tags. Similar tagged items can get special treatment,
such as discounting.
The second new feature of Kraft 0.30 is something called Discount Items. Document items with positive or negative percentage discount can be added, referencing groups of other doc items with similar tags. For example, if fife percent discount should be given on material, that can easily be done by tagging all material items with a tag called 'Material' and create a discount item referencing the group of 'Material'-tagged items.... read more

Kraft 0.25 adds some interesting features to the software that make Kraft more interesting for a broader audience. That is beside others in particular support for followup documents such as an invoice following an offer.

There is new support for localised documents (i.e. write an english document on your german desktop) and some usability improvements.

Another bunch of new features is that with Kraft now complete documents can be copied to new docs. Additionally it is now possible to create followup documents automagically such as an invoice that follows an offer. A wizard that makes the document creation more easy rounds up the release.... read more

Beside the packages from the openSUSE Buildservice for openSUSE- and other popular rpm based distros we now also have K/Ubuntu packages. They were built by Janek Thomaschewski in Launchpad and can be downloaded.

Please see the Download section on the kraft webpage for details.

Version 0.23 is a small maintenance release that fixes some glitches of the 0.22 release.
Especially the creation of new database and the encoding of the pdf template was fixed. Both caused problems with 0.22 and are fixed now with this version.

Additionally this release contains a nicely improved document listview.

trml2pdf is a small script that is based on ReportLabs open source python lib that generates highest quality pdfs from xml files. Kraft uses it for report generation.
Unfortunately trml2pdf is not maintained by ReportLab and the initial maintainer seems not to care too much any more. This version of trml2pdf has two small modifications: It works with utf8 by default and supports colspans for tables.