Chapter 2. Configuring Calligra and Your System

While Calligra should work quite nice out of the box, there may well be some things to optimize to get the best out of Calligra. This chapter shows you what you might want to do to achieve the best results with your new office suite and make it suite your needs. Calligra is highly configurable, even down to detailed toolbar and menu layout.

Customizing the Calligra GUI

While Calligra comes out of the box with a GUI (graphical user interface) that should suit most people's needs, there are good reasons why you may want to change the way the programs look.

My mother, for example, is a bit afraid of buttons and menu entries she doesn't understand. To tailor Calligra to her needs, I reduced the GUI to a bare minimum of functionality. As she only needs to write letters and use certain templates, there is no need for much more functionality than saving, loading, printing, etc.

Thanks to the action concept of Qt™ and KDE, you can freely customize Calligra menubars and tool bars. Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no easy-to-use dialogs to do this. Calligra stores its GUI configuration in XML files and you'll have to edit those. Hopefully, this situation will change in the future; for now, you'll need some basic knowledge of how an XML document works (or HTML, which is a subset of XML).

Normally, each Calligra application has at least two of those XML files: one describing the GUI of the shell (basically, that's what you see if there is no document open) and one describing the GUI of the respective part (that's what you see normally). For example, for Calligra Words, these two XML files are named calligra_shell.rc and words.rc.

Here's a simple example of such an rc-file.

Example 2.1. An example of a simple rc-file

<!DOCTYPE QConfig ><qconfig>
<menubar>
<menu name="Edit"><text>Edit</text>
<action name="edit_cut"/>
<action name="edit_copy"/>
<action name="edit_paste"/>
<separator/>
<action name="edit_find"/>
</menu>
<menu name="Insert"><text>Insert</text>
<action name="insert_picture"/>
<action name="insert_clipart"/>
<menu name="Variable"><text>Variable</text>
<action name="insert_var_datefix"/>
<action name="insert_var_datevar"/>
</menu>
</menu>
</menubar>
<toolbars>
<toolbar name="edit_toolbar" position="right">
<action name="edit_cut"/>
<action name="edit_copy"/>
<action name="edit_paste"/>
</toolbar>
</toolbars>
</qconfig>