Koffice is based on KDE (www.kde.org) which is needed to run Koffice.
You need kdelibs and kdebase installed if you want to compile and 
run koffice. Look in the kdelibs sourcedir for the file COMPILING
for help. Also look at the website as there are many helpfiles 
available.

Koffice is a collection of office applications linked together by a
common basis. This common basis assures that all office application
can work together. You can, for instance, insert a spreadsheet in 
your thesis without leaving your document. Editing the spreadsheet
happens _inside_ your thesis.

The applications included in KOffice as of the release of KDE2 are:
- KWord
  Professional text editing 
- KSpread
  Professional number cruncher/spreadsheet
- KPresenter
  Professional presentation program
- KChart
  Graphing of your abstract data
- KIllustrator
  Vector graphics tool
- KOffice Workspace
  A combination of all of the above

Developers:
===========

KOffice is created by Open Source programmers around the world. All 
developers give there time/code to the community for everyone to
benefit. The major reason this is done is because those developers
want to have a good office suite, and they don't mind sharing it
with you.

If you feel you found a bug or missing feature you can always contact
the developers of koffice (via http://koffice.kde.org) or delve into the
software yourself.

The part that is shared between all koffice applications can be found
in the lib directory. 
There classes like KoDocument can be found; these classes are extended
in the project directories.

Read the .h files in the respective directories for more info.


Document format:
================

All KOffice applications use XML formatted files. The XML format 
can be read with a text editor. XML itself is simply a set
of tags, where the application can define how to display elements defined 
by these tags. The definition of the document type is therefore different 
for each KOffice application (as you will most likely not find a curved 
line in a kword document). The Document Type Definition can be found in 
every application's source directory in the dir '(application)/dtd.'

If you would like more information about the makeup of the actual KOffice 
document structure (not the XML DTD), see the lib/store/SPEC file.

If you want to see more/fix bugs in this file, feel free to ask or add it 
yourself.

Thomas <zander@earthling.net>
(added/edited by Chris Lee <lee@azsites.com>)
