New version of KDE office suite KOffice is out with major changes. The suite contains bitmap graphics editor Krita and vector graphics editor Karbon.

Main changes in Krita:

• new tile engine Tiles3 by Dmitry Kazakov is used by default now;
• brushes and painting:
  • new Grid brush, Soft Brush and Particle brush engines;
  • Sumi-E brush was renamed to Hairy and given "soak ink" option and masking;
  • lots of options were added to Pixel brush (like rotation angle);
  • Dynadraw engine was improved;
  • brush settings can be saved, loaded and searched for now;
  • current brush size can be changed by Shift+dragging;
  • bitmap brushes (.gih) can be rotated now;
  • basic support for Photoshop brushes (ABR) was implemented;
  • mapping of dynamic to saturation, hue, lightness and so on was added;
  • Smudge brush was fixed;
  • old pack of GIMP brushes was replaced with brushes by David Revoy created for his "Chaos and Evolutions" videocourse;
• OpenShiva is thread-safe now and its filters can report progress status;
• file formats support:
  • fixes for reading dpi in JPEG and PNG;
  • better performance in PDF importer;
  • import and export for PPM and JPEG2000, import of XCF and BMP;
  • rewritten import/export OpenEXR;
• masks can now have blending modes and opacity;
• dodge/burn was added;
• XMP metadata was added;
• other changes (with pretty pictures).

Changes in Karbon:

• support for regions in SVG filters;
• support for CSS in SVG importer.

Download the whole suite

More on this topic:

• Interview with Krita developers, 2008
• Krita becomes the first to release a GSoC2011 project feature
• Krita announces first community supported training DVD
• KOffice 2.3.0 is out, featuring rethought Krita bitmap graphics editor
• OpenRaster becomes more accesible on your desktop