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AbiWord Weekly News #67, (2001, week 43, released 2001.11.01)
Welcome to issue 67 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
At least four new features last week: bookmarks, hyperlinks, image dialog and a Windows Write importer. The mailing list also seems to be ready to boil over - it's a long time since I've seen so much traffic of so diverse variety. Appears AbiWord is getting (even) more popular. Exciting!
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.10.20 - 2001.10.26 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| aiken | 274 | Massive web site overhaul. |
| tomas_f | 141 | BiDi changes, support for hyperlinks and bookmarks, and fix zoom of tabs. |
| dom | 125 | Toolbar icons, GNOME configure updates, UNIX goto+bookmark+hyperlink+image dialogs(!), fix for UNIX plugin loading, importer/exporter plugin changes, 64 bit hashcode fix, wv segfault fix, 64bit CPU fixes (with Bernhard Rosenkraenzer), speller hash encodings, and scan ~/.AbiSuite/plugins on startup. |
| mpritchett | 44 | Installer updated, importer/exporter registration fix, zero char width system for Win32 (with tomas_f), and localization patch for Win32 (from Gilles Saint-Denis). |
| msevior | 26 | Dynamic menus for UNIX and (almost) GNOME, Aikasaurus now uses dynamic menus, and fix zoom bug. |
| hub | 23 | Windows Write importer (with Sean Young and Dom), mac makefile updates, fix bug 2112 (from proski@gnu.org), and various BeOS updates (from Stephane Fritsch). |
| rms | 15 | Some GNOME_OPT makefile updates, pt-PT locale updates. |
| fjfranklin | 13 | Various XML related changes. |
| phma | 7 | German update (from Martin Gansser), Catalan update (from Jesus Corrius), and French update (from Gilles Saint-Denis). |
| matti | 6 | List delimiter string stuff. |
| dchart | 3 | 0.9.4 and 0.9.5 changelogs updated. |
| paul | 1 | An RTF importer fix. |
| aaronl | 1 | GTK installation fix. |
Project Of the Week
POW (Project Of the Week) and the new uPOW (User Project Of the Week) is an attempt at attracting new developers and entice help from users by lowering the bar of entry to doing something constructive for AbiWord. A POW will describe a goal and often outline how to get there.
Presently we have a few unclaimed POWs. Please see the POW status page for more details.
| Type | POW | Summary |
| POW | 2001.22 | Sorting contents of combo boxes, and splash screen preference option |
| POW | 2001.18 | ImageMagick multipurpose graphic importer |
| uPOW | 2001.17 | Where to send AbiWord announcements |
| uPOW | 2001.09 | Determining Locale Status |
| uPOW | 2001.07 | Host for AbiWord BugDay |
| uPOW | 2001.06 | Update Feature and UI matrices |
| POW | 2001.05 | Bug-buddy support for AbiWord |
| POW | 1999.47 | Make translated dialogs fit |
| uPOW | 1999.37 | CS folks wanted... |
Bug Update
Here's the AbiWord bug update for the last week. If you can spare some time, please help us triage the bugs - you don't need to be able to program to do this.
Bug Counts
These are the bug counts for the past 4 weeks:
Date: Submitted: QA: Open: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.10.05 145 ( +1%) 170 ( +0%) 352 ( +2%) 2001.10.12 153 ( +5%) 178 ( +4%) 363 ( +3%) 2001.10.19 148 ( -3%) 189 ( +6%) 354 ( -2%) 2001.10.26 150 ( +1%) 188 ( +0%) 353 ( +0%)
Bug Votes
As a user of AbiWord, you are able to vote on bugs you'd like to see closed. The process is quite simple:
Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.
Bring up the bug list.
Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.
If you find an interesting bug you'd like to have fixed, cast your vote by clicking on the "Vote for this bug" link on the bug description page.
You have 30 voting points you can cast in whatever proportions you'd like on anything between 1 and 30 bugs. But note that developers will likely prioritize a bug with 30 single votes than a bug with a single 30-unit vote. So vote with lower unit counts (5 or so) to make your voice heard!
From the sorted list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1410 | Please add .doc Microsoft Word Save As file type in future releases | ||
| 1030 | Font substitution table | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 376 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp | ||
| 1360 | custom pagesizes can't be entered | ||
| 1271 | Postscript print formatting incorrect and inconsistent | ||
| 1406 | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg | ||
| 1876 | some MS Word documents without password are treated as passw | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey |
Target Milestones
We have just started nominating bugs for the next two big releases. You, developer and user, can have your say on which bugs to nominate by casting your vote on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:
| Milestone | Bug count |
| Without Nomination | 282 |
| 0.9.x | 41 |
| 1.0 | 93 |
| future | 85 |
Closed Bugs
Note that there are many many bugs just waiting for QA before they can be closed. Please help!
In the past week, the following 3 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified):
On the Mailing List
Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled on about 200 postings per week.
You may also find interesting threads on the user and documentation lists (unfortunately the archive for the latter is broken at the moment).
This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:
commit: bookmarks and some bidi: Tomas Frydrych added a new feature, namely bookmarks. He later checked in a UNIX dialog.
Plugins: David Welch asked how to write a plugin for AbiWord. Dom followed up with a short description.
Windows Write import: Sean Young announced an importer for Windows Write.
Announce: new web site: This is Jared Davis's announcement of the new web design I mentioned in the last newsletter. It's very sleek, and refocused to give users a smooth ride.
commit: hyperlinks: Another new feature (Hyperlinks) from Tomas Frydrych.
Release stuff: Dom asked the release of 0.9.5 to be pushed back a little to let the new features stabilize.
commit: Dynamic menus for unix and almost gnome: Martin did some work on dynamic menus for UNIX. Also updated the aikasaurus plugin to make use of them.