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AbiWord Weekly News #104, (2002, week 32, released 2002.08.12)
Welcome to issue 104 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
After the bug-squashing and feature adding of last week, this week seems comparatively quiet. However, there is much floating around, particularly many preparations and cleanups, to suggest that the week to come will be nearly as eventful as last week. There was some building issues from source, particularly in relation to fribidi, but most of that's been cleared up (commenting out is the secret to quick clean up).
My bringing back of POW's resulted in me doing something mightily foolish. I've made the mistake of using the actual POW page, which is updated on an "as I remember it" basis. I specifically was going to place unclaimed POW's/uPOW's to the page, but those who've taken up them up between AWN to AWN deserve acknowledgment too. And, I will point out, if you take a POW and would like a li'l extra help, mention it in the list and I'll add that as well. Alan proposed the POW "A Few Good Strings," which Er Perjcao Frito declared a good ZAPping to, and the commit came from Andrew Dunbar. Though this was put in the CVS table last week, as it was a POW, it deserves a special mention.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there will be no bug graph this week either. For those of you dependent on the bug graph, "I feel your pain...and breasts." If you'd like to see the graph anytime soon, send Hub money. The first to send over USD$5000 will get the chart secretly named after them. This offer only good this week.
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: E. A. Zen
CVS Stats
| CVS checkins 2002.08.04 - 2002.08.11 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| tomas_f | 67 | text functionality, conditional removal of layout units, fix to ABI_BUILD_VERSION and removal Abi_fribidi reference |
| fjfranklin | 29 | Configuration work (fribidi, PKG_CHECK_MODULES, make), international character work (UCS4 and UTF8), XML, fix to own work (err, that happens) |
| phma | 3 | Romanian Strings |
| msevior | 3 | shock: Tables (cursor motion, self adjustment, appearance and more stable nesting) |
| wlach | 2 | One character columns and XFT-glyph correction |
| hub | 2 | Explained why MSVC is evil and corrected some ANSI-C issues |
| tamlin | 1 | explained that too many semicolons spoil the cpp |
| jordimas | 1 | Win32 Toolbar fixing |
| plam | 1 | recursive locking in mutex |
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 | 2002.27 | fix windows printing bugs |
I know of no additional POW-dom other than mentioned at the beginning of this AWN. However, I will point out that our other week 27 POW, "find a Windows maintainer," is marked partially done. This means Jordi Mas, this POW's hero, needs a little work. Mentioned for the amusement of the editor.
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.
This graph was not sent unsolicited. In fact, it was not sent at all. This graph does, however, fall into compliance with a bill that was never even proposed. The Bill of Wasteful Crap. You may not know this, but The Bill of Wasteful Crap has been passed from civilization to civilization. The ancient Egyptians used The Bill of Wasteful Crap to pawn bad terracotta dolls, or action figures, of various dieties, leaders and animals. The Assyrians expanded on The Bill of Wasteful Crap by giving it economic viability. The ancient Greeks started to horde various crackpot beliefs under the protection of The Bill of Wasteful Crap. The Romans officialized crackpotism to The Bill of Wasteful Crap with the creation of an entire society devoted to luxury. The Holy Roman Empire originally sought to reduce The Bill of Wasteful Crap to its core ideals, but Charlemain thought better of it when he discovered crushed velvet. The Gauls would dirty The Bill of Wasteful Crap by including really bad food as a necessity. The English re-wrote parts of The Bill of Wasteful Crap to create Mercantilism. The Americans became masters of The Bill of Wasteful Crap with the introduction of an extensive messaging system: Federal Mail. This would eventually be accentuated on by the first ordering catalogues, and later, by email.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 |
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:
layout/screen units mess: Tomas takes the time to explain what is so screwy with Abiword's wysiwyg capabilities; basically put, the conflict between processing the rendering of the text is done by both screen units (pixels and sub-pixels) and layout units (inches and centimetres). Tomas wishes to use a layout more in line with Pango's (to which AbiWord will transition to over the next eon).
Re: Re: Commit: Docbook plugin work: Kenneth J. Davis notes the Win32 build was destabilized by hub's original commit.
Re: Re: Commit: Docbook plugin work: Kenneth J. Davis declares "This hack is ugly!" Additionally this isn't a typo; this is just a weird li'l break up that happened.
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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