I'd like to summarize where we are:

KDE 3.3.2 was released and while there are the usual regressions, I don't see an urgent need for a KDE 3.3.3 yet. I keep you posted about that.

KDE 3.4 Alpha 1 was released and the number of incoming bugs indicates it's put to use.

December 18th (*THIS SATURDAY*) starts feature freeze. This means, no new features can be added that weren't noted in the feature list before.

After that I keep you doing what you like and start of january will see the last first beta of a KDE3. I would like everyone to be finished with new features till then.

KTTS is a subsystem within the KDE desktop for conversion of text to audible speech. KTTS is currently under development and aims to become the standard subsystem for all KDE applications to provide speech output.

User Features:

• Speak any text from the KDE clipboard.
• Speak any plain text file.
• Speak all or any portion of a text file from Kate.
• Speak all or any portion of an HTML page from Konqueror.
• Use as the speech backend for KMouth and KSayIt.
• Speak KDE notifications (KNotify).
• Long text is parsed into sentences. User may backup by sentence or paragraph, replay, pause, and stop playing.
• Audio output via aRts or GStreamer (version 0.8.7 or later)

Programmer features:

• Priority system for screen reader outputs, warnings and messages, while still playing regular texts.
• Plugin-based architecture for support of a wide variety of speech synthesis engines and drivers.
• Permit generation of speech from the command line (or via shell scripts) using the KDE DCOP utilities.
• Provide a lightweight and easily usable interface for applications to generate speech output.
• Applications need not be concerned about contention over the speech device.
• FUTURE: Provide support for speech markup languages, such as VoiceXML, Sable, Java Speech Markup Language (JSML), and Speech Markup Meta-language (SMML).
• FUTURE: Provide limited support for embedded speech markers.
• Asynchronous to prevent system blocking.

KTTS actually consists of several programs:

• kttsd: the KDE Text-to-Speech Deamon, which is a non-GUI application that provides TTS services to applications via DCOP.
• kttsmgr: a GUI application for configuring and controlling kttsd. kttsmgr sits in the system tray.
• libkhtmlkttsdplugin: A plugin for the Konqueror web browser that permits you to speak all or a portion of the text on a web page.
• katekttsdplugin: A plugin for the Kate text editor that permits you to speak all or a portion of a text file.

To use KTTS, you need KDE 3.2 or greater and a speech synthesizer, such as Festival, Festival Lite (flite), Epos, Hadifix, or FreeTTS.

For more information and downloads, including Debian and SuSe binary packages, see the KTTS website at http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/kttsd/

KolourPaint is a free, easy-to-use paint program for KDE. Features include undo/redo, more than a dozen tools, selections, transparent image editing and zoom support.

KolourPaint 1.2.2 fixes several longstanding bugs, improves performance and for the first time in history, includes translations to 32 languages.

Bugs fixed include:

• incorrect scaling/zooming under Qt 3.0
• missing icons in some GNU/Linux distributions
• copying selections with the CTRL key not working

The 1.2.2 release with full source code is immediately available for download at http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/download.html. This is a backport of KDE 3.3.2's KolourPaint to KDE 3.0.

We're still looking for a website maintainer but nevertheless, the site has been updated with an expanded About section and a new People page.

KolourPaint Project - http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/
"Your paintings, our passion"