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AbiWord Weekly News #103, (2002, week 31, released 2002.08.09)
Welcome to issue 103 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
This has been a week full of surprises, and not like the nice kind, where a bank error is sided in your favour. This has been more along the lines of the revenue service wonders why your forms are in crayon, whether "Sparky" is really your six year old son or if your mistress can really count as a dependent. Luckily for us, we have Arthur Anderson and Aberdeen! Abisource went into infinite fcsk mode, and on the second day, asked, "Hey, man, this is wrong for some reason, and where do all these packets keep coming from?" It rebooted and life got better. Take heart, it didn't stop the hackers from hacking or the users from abusing. It did delay AWN for a few days.
There will be a lack of the bug update graph for at least this week, and remain so until it has been implemented on the server (Jesper originally implemented this on his home machine). I looked forward to this graph quite a bit, to be honest, but I do not possess ither the database or guaranteed connection for the related script.
Last week, AWN's longest editor, Jesper Skylov, was arrested and brought up on charges against the D.M.C.A. Well, maybe he just retired in preperation for more important things. Thanks to his help and willingness to put up with my constant badgering, you get a nice li'l AWN full of most of the same information. For complaints, feel free not to contact me; for compliments, send "thank you"s to Jesper who supplied me with scripts, information and clues (I'm inherently clue-impaired, and my hair is pointy...). This issue should look just almost like the one before it, but with more up-to-the-week information.
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: E. A. Zen
CVS Stats
| CVS checkins 2002.07.22 - 2002.07.28 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| tomas_f | 84 | Many mechanical complexities, see Mailing list for detials |
| dom | 106 | clipboard (POSIX), plugins (DocBook and PERL), GTK2 (dialogues), Reverse Loader Bug (with Plam) and bugs (1319 and 3840) |
| jordimas | 38 | Win32 documentation, pasting BMPs (Win32), context sensitive Paste option, Win32 Commandline support, Win32 "Insert Table" dialogue and bugs (3584 and 3824) |
| plam | 23 | footnote & endnote hierarchy correction, additional reverse loading fix and code cleanup for maintainability, |
| uwog | 21 | GTK2(scrollwheel, rulers, tabs, styles and tab & list dialogues*) and added a patch for "nuking Irac" |
| biesi | 16 | Remove the "static" variable for gcc3.1 |
| phearbear | 15 | QNX work towards Drag'n'drop...drop |
| msevior | 14 | Work towards nested tables, nested tables, |
| tamlin | 11 | MSVC6 compilation updated and properly functioning destructor |
| gg | 5 | Dictionary fetching cleanup, downloading cleanup, GTK2 (progressbar), CURL |
| jskov | 5 | RTF cleanup (OO did evil), build error & debug build, macdinkery, bug (3360) |
| jeremyd | 4 | corrections to indicate building DLL |
| phma | 2 | Nynorsk update by Karl Ove Hufthammer |
| hippietrail | 2 | additions from pejcaofrito@yahoo.com ("This one changes menu shortcuts as in M$ word 97. 'Table Menu' added; Needs translation." Plus bug 3546 |
| dchart | 1 | Changelog update |
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 an unclaimed POWs. Please see the POW status page for more details.
| Type | POW | Summary |
| POW | 2002.27 | fix windows printing bugs |
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.
The NASDAQ did magical things and people cried at the DOW. No change in the S&P. Someone put money into AMEX but moved it to Heng Seng before trading began. London, well, FILTH. Deutsch marks smell like pastries and the yen rose slightly today, to reach a mind-blowing value of USD$0.00023433. Corporate greed resulted in an unnamed company shoveling retiree cash into a small dot-com that collapsed after spending its entire worth on minty candies. I hope this heals some wounds left by a lack of a graph here.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 |
| 3269 | 120 | --- | Crashing on printing |
| 3171 | 85 | 1.0.x | rtf sets top and bottom margins to 0 |
| 376 | 80 | 1.2 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slu...... |
| 3525 | 70 | --- | font incorrectly printed and spaced |
| 1406 | 61 | 1.0.x | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg |
| 1747 | 42 | 1.2 | background colour of text selection is always grey |
| 1194 | 39 | 1.2 | alt+xxxx does not insert special symbols |
| 2362 | 30 | --- | AbiWord only prints across half of page |
| 3778 | 29 | --- | Hanging indent setting ignores units |
| 1818 | 25 | --- | Font reverts to Times New Roman when it shouldn't |
| 2868 | 25 | 1.2 | character widths are not calculated correctly for some fonts... |
| 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 | 1.0.x | Prints incorrect margins with split page. |
| 2924 | 15 | --- | printing abw documents defaults to black pages |
| 3804 | 15 | --- | segmentation fault when opening application |
| 1865 | 13 | --- | Header/footer not loaded properly from .doc |
| 2962 | 13 | 1.2 | Printer problems with Lexmark printers on Windows |
| 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 | 188 | 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 |
| 344 | TODO tooltips for the TopRuler. |
| 3060 | The highlighted text width is not the same after Insert H... |
| 3590 | Edit menu has duplicated keyboard accelerator ( Paste Unf... |
| 3647 | cursor disappears |
| 3815 | Mouse wheel scrolling broken |
| 3822 | Tab stops can't be placed out |
| 3837 | Show Para. Crashes abiword when using tables |
| This Week's 5 Most Active QA Helpers | |
| Verified | Name |
| 4 | Marc Maurer |
| 2 | Dom Lachowicz |
| 1 | Hubert Figuiere |
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://pino.frontisterion.nl/uwog/abiword/ | Provided by Marc Maurer, aka Wonder Boy! 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:
updateBackgroundColor mechanism is badly flawed: Tomas finds the updateBackgroundColor call to be insufficient and terribly flawed. This leads him to ask, "So my question is why do we need updateBackground() colour at all?" Along with many interesting answers and redressments comes a proposal from Marc, who was conspiring with Martin at the time.
proposed updateBacgroundColor() fix: Tomas hones in on an idea to allow AbiWord to better represent transparent, and was mistaken for an idea to repair an issue pointed out by Marc.
commit head: improve fp_Run::updateBackgroundColor(): Sensing a theme? This is the beginning of an extensive discussion on Tomas' work on UT_RGBcolor class. Improvements are made later.
Commit (STABLE): fix bug 3802: Hub applies a nice patch to a stable release. Martin places the conception of a 1.0.3 release into discourse, noting, on a by-the-by basis, that it would be so nice to have the pretty splash screen that the POSIX users enjoy on the Win-builds. Alan mentions that he would like a unified artwork release, thus being, in his occasionally humble opinion, the only good reason for a 1.0.3 at all; he specifically would like to flee from, both, the SourceGear and ant-related, artworks altogether.
Re: abiword translation (fwd): Alan continues a discuss in relation to a question asked by Mugurel Tudor in relation to the string source for AbiWord's various translations. Though a .strings vs .po holy war doesn't incur, an interesting discussion about preferred translation techniques is included.
Various things, multiple names, happy August Fool's Day: This is where I beg Jesper for pre-last minute help (very pre-).
cursor blinking problem: Tomas, ever on the bug hunt, makes another "observation." He points to various problems with the technique used to blink the cursor. This results in a return to the discussion of Mike Nordell's patch to Sam's patch archive.
commit: fl_BlockLayout.h/cpp: Tomas implements his fix to the cursor blinking problem, despite concerns from Martin. This is unconditionally the most engaging thread I have seen in some time. Martin comes off as a near bad guy when he suggested that Pat was spending his coding time less than beneficially.
Special Interest --
From time to time, this section will contain essay-style text about various special interests of the AbiWord development.
OBTW, this is a living document, which means, "I just noticed my href's got stripped and I wanted them back in place." By "just noticed," I would really pin it down to four...five hours ago. I apologize to anyone who had to "think" to get to bugs or Sam's Patch Archive.... Well, not really, but it's the thought that counts.
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