The Calligra team has announced the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. This version is the result of thousands of commits which provide new features, polishing of the user experience and bug fixes.

What’s New in Calligra 2.8:

• The word processing application, and Author, the writer’s application, both gained support for comments in the document.
• Sheets, the spreadsheet application, has improved support for pivot tables.
• improved quality of existing features of Kexi, the visual database creator.
• Kexi is able to open hyperlinks in forms
• Flow, the diagram editor, has new support for SVG based stencils.
• Krita, a new high-quality scaling mode for the OpenGL canvas, G’Mic integration, a wraparound painting mode for easy creation of textures and tiles, support for touch screens.
• Two new applications based on Krita: Krita Sketch, aimed at tablets and Krita Gemini, which can switch between desktop and tablet mode at the press of a button.
• For details, see the release note.

Install Calligra:

Kubuntu Backports PPA provides the latest builds of Calligra for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise and their derivatives.

To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, paste the command below and run to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

Then update and install the app:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install calligra

Once installed, you can find the calligra suite from Menu or Unity Dash.