KWord is a free (LGPL) word processor, member of the KOffice project of the KDE Desktop Environment.

Despite the name, KWord isn't meant simply as a clone of Microsoft Word. Although it is hoped in the future that KWord will support most of Word's features, in some important respects it is different. The text-layout scheme in KWord is based on frames, making it similar to Adobe FrameMaker. These can be placed anywhere on the page, and can incorporate text, graphics and embedded objects. Each new page is a new frame, but the text is able to flow through KWord's ability to link frames together. The use of frames means that complicated graphical layouts can be achieved relatively easily in KWord.

History

KWord was created as part of the KOffice project in 1998 using several ideas from FrameMaker such as the frames approach. The initial author confessed that the application and its code were not top notch since it was his first object-oriented application.

In 2000 the KWord application was in a state that made it very hard to fix problems and nobody was working on the known problems anymore. There had not been any official release of the application in all this time. In the same year a new maintainer started working on the application and over the duration of 2000 and the beginning of 2001 he worked to fix any problems in the structuring of the application.

Many DTP applications use frames, much like KWord does, but these DTP applications use a concept called 'master pages' which gives the power to the user to design the structure of the document. Unfortunately this concept does come at a huge usability price since most users simply don't understand the concept behind master pages and end up working around them.

The KWord developers designed the frames usage to be a usable variant of master pages with intelligent copying of frames and their position when a new page is created, for example when there is too much text for a page.

External links

• Project Homepage