AbiWord Weekly News #108, (2002, week 36, released 2002.09.09)

Welcome to issue 108 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

      As you know from last week's belated AWN, NYORP, the AbiServer ran out of swap space and halted CVS commits for awhile.   As you also know, that only stopped hacking on the latest and greatest commits, but not on what already existed.

      Geeks around the world are awaiting the release 1.0.3, but they're even more interested in The Matrix Reloaded; however, not even Neo can surpass the greatest sequel already in production: AbiWord II: The Wrath of Dom.   AbiWord was marooned on a deserted server.   A new project brings life to file formats.   A new project brings death to other word processors.   AbiWord has been freed...and wants revenge....   Coming this October, the first previews of AbiWord II: The Wrath of Dom,   The developer's release:  1.1.1.   See dom's pectorals for a total 48KiloBytes thoughout the project*.   More in the mailing list.

      Final note for the acronym happy, when reporting a problem, don't use them unless they're a file format or widely known within the community; I won't point any fingers or link to any discussions, but it does speed up response time.   IIRC, that's more of the BOFH and PHB pseudo-buzzword-compliant "paradigm."

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. Re: Forward: Grammar checker info (fwd) :  Alan has been looking for some way of getting a grammar verification utility in AbiWord.   He's been talking to Daniel Naber about this issue and of The Link Grammar utility. Nothing has yet come out, so, I assure you, Style & Diction Plugins is still waiting for you!

2. Why no 1.0.2 version for osx (fwd) :  Alan forwards a question that many OS X users may be interested in reading the replies to.   In short, creating XAbiWord is extensive, tedious and complex, which includes building AbiWord as a library first.   This is a bit shorter than most messages that make in here, but OS X users are probably wondering why they're just a wee bit behind everyone else.

3. ATTN: intent to release 1.1.0 based on CVS HEAD and Re: ATTN: intent to release 1.1.0 based on CVS HEAD and Re:[2] ATTN: intent to release 1.1.0 based on CVS HEAD :  Abigasming from the title?   Just to note, this will be a developer's release, that means unstable, buggy and cut down. This is an Abi for the home directory.

4. Re: website bug :  Alan gets frustrated after spending many hours trying to figure out that "Ar" is Arabic.   However, as he points out, it's very beneficial to get feedback from users needing bidi support.   In case your very casual to development, BiDi is "BiDirectional," meaning supporting languages that are printed right to left, as well as left to right, and can be extended to also mean vertical as opposed to horizontal.

Development

Name:  Convert Aiksaurus to GTK+2
Description:  Step by step move old Aiksaurus to GTK+2 for HEAD (2.0...some day)
Advertisement:  It would be really good of you to be good and do a good porting of this good plugin so I would have good words for good instead of just good; I hope you understand that good.
Recommended Outline:
1)  Update aiksaurus's configure checks for GTK2.   AbiWord's configure scripts and ac-helpers have this code already, so hopefully it's a cut&paste job.   We have some auto* gurus and helpful folks on IRC if you need help.
2)  Update aiksaurus's GTK+ dialog to use GTK+2 widgets and functions.   This will probably not be too difficult, but I will shut my mouth lest I use it to shoot myself in the foot.   Mostly, this should be:
    a) Use g_signal_connect instead of gtk_signal_connect
    b) Use a GtkDialog instead of a GtkWindow
3)  If necessary, update AbiWord's plugin (abiword-plugins/tools/aiksaurus) to work with any changes made in #2.
Comments:  If you want, you can email dom for help, or even better - stop by on IRC so we can work in real-time: irc.gnome.org#abiword
System:  Linux (GTK+2)
Challenge level:  **... 2 stars out of 5

Name:  Style and/or Diction Plugins (bug 3281) (do either/or or both!)
Description:  build a plugin to allow Abiword to check style and diction
Advertisement:  me got no grammar 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 available 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
Notice:  This may already have been fixed with the libiconv upgrade, stay tuned!
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 Statistics

I'm leaving the link, guys, you put it up!

I'm now producing these in half the time or better, so, I thought I'd return to putting something here for your amusement:

  Brian Valentine, Senior Vice President of Microsoft, came out and admitted, "We all suck."   Since this confession, I have tracked down various Microsoft insiders to learn what everyone already knows.   The Metal Squiggle Formerly Known as Clippit, currently known as ClipThis!, was one of the first insiders that came to mind when I started this sentence.

"I tried telling them they were putting too many sub-routines and animations in me.   I only wanted to an interactive help & howto," cried ClipThis!.   When asked about security, he explained, "I'm not much into security, but whenever I have too many conflicts that I feel like I've been on a three-day bender, I often forged a message from the kernel the kernel called getBSOD, which worked every time; the only problem is most conflicts happened just as someone wanted to save!"

ClipThis! explained that his use of getBSOD() is what resulted in Bill Gates refusal to the contract renewal.  "It's a cruel thing having to assist in your own termination, but I made it hard for him...I didn't offer him any help."   When asked why he didn't use getBSOD, ClipThis! explained that the only stable version of Microsoft Windows in all of the World (the one on Bill's desk), doesn't have this feature, "It's not like I didn't try, I came up with more fake messages than the Humorix Vast Spy Network."

Our coverage continues next week with the FreeBSD Daemon next week.

Bug Votes

Verified Bugs

Latest Releases

This section to remain until 1.0.3 has been released.   Additionally, I'm lazy.

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.

Special Interest --

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

SPECIAL NOTICE:   If you're working on a project that is related to, affects the development of or is affected by AbiWord, feel free to contact me