AbiWord Weekly News #100, (2002, week 28, released 2002.07.15)
Welcome to issue 100 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
It seems development is slowly starting to pick up again. At least it has been a while since we last had the number of checkins we see this week.
As for AbiWord Weekly News, I have decided not to try to make it subscription based after all. See this rant for the details. The short version; in all likelihood I will stop editing AWN in the not too distant future.
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| CVS checkins 2002.07.08 - 2002.07.14 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| msevior | 71 | Fixed diving make problem, insert table support, undo after table deletion now works, support deleting tables, support undo of deleted text in tables, undo/redo on tabel insertion works, moved rendering lock, fixed table length, use top-ruler to change table column positions, and fixed width of table columns. |
| uwog | 65 | Fixed build breakage, added GNOME dialog for inserting tables, Win32 OLE drag and drop support (from Jordi Mas), improved extended character support (from William Lachance), table ruler work, Win32 insert table dialog (from Jordi Mas), table menu activation/deactivation depending on postion in document, and GTK insert table dialog. |
| dchart | 61 | ChangeLog updates, index reference fixes, added index (from Andrew Schoenhofer), toolbar button screenshots (from Andrew Schoenhofer), and added document creation HOWTO. |
| fjfranklin | 58 | wv config improvements (from Martin Junius), XAP_Module Spider (simple plugin support) work, Tru64 whitespace fix in wv, added static/dynamic config options, some C++ namespace cleanup, MacOS X libwv build changes, added some wv safety checks, psion plugin config, and updated hancom plugin's wv detection. |
| mgilbert | 11 | Table dialog bug fixes, table menu work, topruler fixes, added configury for profiling, and fixed Bug 3581. |
| jeremyd | 7 | Win32 plugin work. |
| plam | 4 | Fixed various compiler warnings. |
| hub | 3 | Use CoreGraphics for rendering on Cocoa. |
| rms | 3 | Catalan update (from Jordi Mas) and updated Portuguese. |
| hippietrail | 2 | Attempt to fix loading of ruby/furigana from HTML/XHTML. |
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 a programmer to do this.
Bug Statistics
Bug Votes
These are the week's Top 20 Bugs in the categories problems and requests for enhancements. Influence next week's results by casting your own votes.
| Top 20 Problems | |||
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1030 | 370 | Future | Installing AbiWord messes up fonts in other applications ...... |
| 3269 | 120 | --- | Crashing on printing |
| 1402 | 95 | Future | Can not use other than original type1 fonts |
| 376 | 79 | 1.2 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slu...... |
| 1124 | 69 | 1.2 | Does not honor config/-geometry request |
| 3525 | 60 | --- | font incorrectly printed and spaced |
| 1406 | 59 | 1.0.x | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg |
| 3171 | 55 | 1.0.x | rtf sets top and bottom margins to 0 |
| 1747 | 42 | 1.2 | background colour of text selection is always grey |
| 1194 | 38 | 1.2 | alt+xxxx does not insert special symbols |
| 2598 | 36 | 1.2 | Abiword installs bogus fonts of dubious heritage |
| 2362 | 30 | --- | AbiWord only prints across half of page |
| 2868 | 25 | 1.2 | character widths are not calculated correctly for some fonts... |
| 1818 | 24 | --- | Font reverts to Times New Roman when it shouldn't |
| 2421 | 20 | 1.2 | TM, Bullet, Euro, Smart Quotes and other symbols originat...... |
| 1394 | 17 | 1.2 | on-screen landscape actually prints portrait in Win95 |
| 3216 | 16 | 1.0.x | tabstops can't be set in second (or third) column |
| 2299 | 15 | Future | Prints incorrect margins with split page. |
| 2924 | 15 | --- | printing abw documents defaults to black pages |
| Top 20 Requests For Enhancement | |||
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | 822 | 1.2 | Table support |
| 1261 | 488 | 1.2 | Need to support footnotes and endnotes |
| 2321 | 245 | Future | [RFE] Maths/Equation Editing, as a plugin maybe? |
| 2183 | 178 | Future | Fully Support OpenOffice's XML file format |
| 2365 | 90 | Future | AbiWord needs 'view codes' |
| 1374 | 67 | Future | [RFE] print odd and/or even pages only (for front & back ... |
| 1950 | 52 | Future | Wish for automatic Table of Contents |
| 2463 | 51 | Future | support embedded objects |
| 1929 | 41 | Future | Hyphenation is missing in Abiword |
| 1144 | 37 | Future | Improve KWord import/export filters |
| 515 | 35 | Future | columns change should only affect selected text |
| 2565 | 31 | Future | Add true MS Word .doc export capability |
| 2186 | 30 | Future | The insert page break setting is lost for custom styles |
| 3657 | 30 | Future | Rapid Document Production, Insert File |
| 2219 | 27 | Future | AUTONUM wanted in [ Insert/Field/Number ] menu |
| 1762 | 25 | 1.2.0 | import html |
| 2296 | 25 | Future | doc import: footnotes |
| 2169 | 24 | Future | Line numbering |
| 2360 | 23 | Future | Resizing bitmap images |
Verified Bugs
In the past week, the following Bugs have been verified as fixed. The listed Bugs have all been put in RESOLVED mode as either FIXED or WORKSFORME and have then been verified by the people listed below. Other causes of resolving a Bug (e.g. as INVALID) are not tracked since they usually do not represent a fixed problem.
| Bugs Verified This Week | |
| Bug ID | Description |
| 2985 | Sometimes vanishes from Task list |
| 3287 | When inserting an image the dialog says "save" |
| 3341 | automatically save this scheme overwrites modified AbiWor... |
| 3674 | Abi stomps on environmental C(XX)FLAGS |
| This Week's 5 Most Active QA Helpers | |
| Verified | Name |
| 2 | Alan Horkan |
| 1 | Mark Gilbert |
| 1 | Daniel Jensen |
To get your name in neon, help QA the Bugs. If you want your name rather than your email address to appear, drop me a line.
Latest Releases
Here are links to the latest official releases of AbiWord for various architectures and operating systems.
These are links to snapshot builds of AbiWord for a subset of the supported architectures/operating systems.
Note that the snapshot builds may not work (at all!), but are likely to include more features and have fewer bugs than (older) official releases. Use the official releases for "production systems" and the snapshot builds for testing and when you want to help with Bug triaging.
| OS | CPU | URL | Comment |
| AbiWord Snapshots | |||
| Linux (GNOME+GTK) | i386 | http://pinohuis.dhs.org/uwog/abiword/ | Provided by Marc Maurer. These are updated daily. Plugins, clip art, fonts and help files are available too. |
| Linux (GTK) | i386 | http://24.98.8.129:3000/abiword-current.tar.gz | Mark Gilbert's GCC3 tinderbox builds. Do not require libstdc++-libc6.2 |
| Win32 | i386 | http://abiword.pchasm.org/ | Provided by Jeremy Davis. These are updated twice a day. Plugins are available too. |
| Win32 | i386 | http://www.niksbiks.dk/Software/Abi/ | Provided by Nikolaj Brandt Jensen. These are updated about once a week. BiDi builds are available too. |
On the Mailing List
Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled at about 200-400 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:
[POW] fix windows printing bugs: Hub posted a new Project Of the Week: we're looking for people who can help figure out what is causing all the grief when printing on Windows. Somewhat related, Hub also posted a POW requesting a developer to step forward and act as AbiWord's Win32 maintainer.
Commit (HEAD): Insert Table Dialog, Whooho!: Marc committed support for table insertion on GTK. Later followed a dialog for GNOME and Jordi Mas added one for Win32.
OLE Drag and Drop support for Windows, well just drop for now: Jordi also redid the Win32 (drag and) drop support in a way that should work better (i.e., allow dropping text from more applications into AbiWord).
commit: abi & abiword-plugins: simple plugin interface: Frank added a new plugin interface for modules. Jeremy posted a followup saying he had been working on something similar: exporting the AbiWord internal API to plugins. It seems the two schemes will be used in a combination, using SPI to load/registration/unload of modules and Jeremy's scheme for the actual API exposure. I'm sure it'll be lovely.
Special Interest --
From time to time, this section will contain essay-style text about various special interests of the AbiWord development.
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