AbiWord Weekly News #106, (2002, week 33, released 2002.08.25)

Welcome to issue 106 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

In this issue:

• Discussion
• Development
• Bug Update
• Latest Releases
• Special Interest

Editor(s) of this issue: E. A. Zen

Discussions

Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled at about 200-400 postings per week.

This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:

1. Installation directory confusion :  A short-lived discussion about where AbiWord should go.   References are made to LSB and thinking outside the (distro) box.  Later, to entertain uwog, I may have mentioned *.lif.

2. smart quotes, summary of discussion :  For those that missed the extensive smart quotes discussion from before, Tomas summarizes the intended fix, though, it's somewhat limited to English (American in particular) which may mean a replacement to the replacement in a few more years.

3. Re: Psiconv :  The function of the day is snprintf(), which formats strings (series of characters) without the risk of buffer overflow (MS Windows). MG has decided to get rid of snprintf() because he's uncertain about third party Unices.   Something he might have missed at the last elections was that snprintf() is required for POSIX compliance.

4. Commit (HEAD): Font Preview :  In case you've chosen to ignore my previous mention of "Big Secret Project, Don't Tell Anyone", this is the message of the commit for uwog's kick-tuchey code for previewing fonts.   He also informs anyone wanting to expand to other platforms how to make the preview code work for them.   Naturally, the Lord of QNX took to this queue quickly.

Development

The concept of a "Project Of the Week" is to single out tasks of major interest that outside developers might be interested in providing assistance to.   Until a "best way" of listing POWs come to mind, they shall be listed in a short description.   Any user interested is welcome to assist in tackling these POWs.

Name:  Style and Diction Plugins (bug 3281)
Description:  build a plugin to allow Abiword to check style and diction
Advertisement:  me got no grammer fixer, help mes can't you?
Recommended Outline:  Create a plugin for AbiWord that allows the checking of style and diction.  The source code for the gnu style and diction tools is avialable here: http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
      As a prototype you might be able to hack something using the AbiCmd plugin to wrap the style and diction tools.  The AikSaurus (Thesaurus) plugin should also be a helpful guide.
      When you get the basics working you could try to get Abiword to display green squiggle underlines to mark errors, or otherwise work on a good user interface.
Comments:  A great way to start playing with the AbiSource
System:  Any OS will be fine.
Challenge level:  ***.. 3 stars out of 5

Name:  Fix Windows printing boogs (bug 3239)
Description:  build a plugin to allow Abiword to check style and diction
Advertisement:  ????????????????????????????? (no, that's really the ad!)
Recommended Outline:  You must become magical to know how to fix this.
Comments:  "The problem is that printing on Windows is broken with several brand of printer drivers (see dependent bugs). It appears that with standard PostScript driver it does not happen. It appears also that version 0.9.6 had less problems than 1.0.1 so we might find out where the regression is bu diffing.
    "Please, be sure to read all the bug reports. Even partial fix are accepted.
    "Fixes must be done against STABLE tree and possibly ported to HEAD (the later can be done as a second step)."
      This comes from Hub
System:  Windows
Challenge level:  ****. 4 stars out of 5

Name:  More Windows Maintainers
Description:  Jordi could always use help
Advertisement:  Help free people from the oppression of MSWord today!
Recommended Outline:  You must become magical to know how to fix this.
Comments:  Wouldn't be a bad idea to start with the printing bug...
System:  Windows
Challenge level:  ****. 4 stars out of 5

Bug Update

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.

Gave up scripting this because I was going golfing...it'll be all enscript next week, also, no micro-article from me about the bug graph, because I should be in bed already before beginning the first leg of my trip home.

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.

This section just a copy and paste; you can kiss it goodbye if you want!

Special Interest --

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