AbiWord Weekly News #101, (2002, week 29, released 2002.07.22)

Welcome to issue 101 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

AbiWord development is ramping up. This week there has been a massive amount of development happening, on many different fronts: tables are gaining features that make them look really pwetty, font support improvements on Unix (also looks really pwetty), we now have automatic download of spell checker dictionaries, and there's been many many bugs fixes.

There's also been some mumbling from E. A. Zen and Mark Gilbert taking over the editing of AbiWord Weekly News, so there's a good chance you may still be able to get your weekly fix when I stop AWN work in a week or two.

In this issue:

• CVS Stats
• Bug Update
• Latest Releases
• On the Mailing List
• Special Interest

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. commit: abi: cuenca's Xft mega-patch: Frank committed Joaquín's xft work. Although there are still some issues (mainly performance) to sort out, this is very promising: the font rendering in AbiWord looks much better than it ever did before (on Unix) and avoids the font registration problems of the past too.

2. [ANN] New Win32 maintainer: Hubert announced that Jordi Mas is now the new Win32 maintainer of AbiWord. Go Jordi!

3. Commit: New Dialog_Download_File: Gabriel Gerhardsson added a new functionality to AbiWord; the first time you load a file that uses a language for which you do not have a dictionary, it will be automatically downloaded and installed. This fixes a long-standing usability problem; users now do not have to know how to install extra dictionaries to get proper spell checking.

4. Commit (HEAD): Cell border color support: Marc added support for changing the color of cell borders in tables. Apparently not content with this, Marc has also added support for changing the background color and style of cells. Here's a snapshot. Looks very nice!

5. Fwd: libole2 -> libgsf: Jody Goldberg would like the AbiWord developers to look at libgsf and start using it. This library will allow code sharing with Gnumeric (and probably other GNOME apps). It's a good idea, no question about it. But there's very limited development resources in AbiWord at the momement, and nobody appears willing to jump at libgsf integration; other AbiWord features are prioritized higher. Hopefully someone will look at it before Jody gives up trying to share code... Here is a later followup from Jody.

6. commit: Delete rows and columns.: Even though Martin has been attending the Boston summit, he managed to check in some more table work. He also later admitted to having added support for inserting columns.

7. commit: abi: activate the Spider: Frank activated his "spider" (SPI) which I mentioned briefly in last week's issue. Having read a bit more about it, I think the previous description I made was wrong. The SPI should allow loading/registration/unloading of modules, and dependency tracking between them. The other API mentioned (by Jeremy) is exporting the AbiWord API as C functions, rather than the natural C++ functions. The point of this is to reduce the linker problems caused by the way C++ function names are mangled.

8. commit: start of footnote backend: Patrick has started working on footnotes. It seems that the next AbiWord release is going to make a lot of people happy.

9. commit - color preferences preparation: I have started working on making the colors used by AbiWord for rendering squiggles, hyperlinks, paragraph information and other stuff configurable.

Special Interest --

From time to time, this section will contain essay-style text about various special interests of the AbiWord development.