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AbiWord Weekly News #78, (2001, week 2, released 2002.01.16)
Welcome to issue 78 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
The developers keep plugging away at those pesky Bugs. This week we got another feature completion (import of lists from RTF/MSDoc) and many localization and documentation updates. It seems we're heading somewhere!
You may not have noticed, but over the last weeks, quite a few of the Top Ten Bugs have been fixed, so right now the voting scores are pretty low. You may want to cast your vote...
The Bug count in the QA To Verify category is climbing. Please help us close them by downloading the 0.99.1 release and verify that the problems have been fixed. AbiWord 0.99.1 binaries may just be available when you read this (at least Red Hat Linux 7.2 RPMs are available now at http://savannah.gnu.org/download/abiword/0.99.1/).
Also, if you want to help with the QA process during the 0.99.x cycle, you can find nightly builds for Windows here: http://www.darklogic.org/abiword/ and less frequent (but more stable builds) here: http://www.niksbiks.dk/Abi/. For Linux/GNOME you can find nightly builds here: http://pinohuis.dhs.org:8081/. Thanks!
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2002.01.05 - 2002.01.11 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dchart | 73 | Documentation content updated for 1.0. |
| fjfranklin | 69 | HP UX build update (from Martin Gansser), wv autoconf/make updates, RPM spec and perl script (from Gabriel Gerhardsson), Slovenian spell checker files added, updated American and British hash files, Galician hash file (from Ramon Flores), workaround for libxml2 bug, plugin install directory changed, and autoconf fixes. |
| dom | 51 | String fix, work on AbiWord documentation helper scripts, added/updated some icons, documentation spelling(?), mutex implementation. |
| tomas_f | 40 | BiDi work, fixed Bugs 1153, 1734. Indent and tab fixes, MS Word list import, localized font warning, PS graphics tweaks(?), and some code cleanup. |
| aiken | 37 | Aiksaurus work. |
| rms | 9 | Duch update (from Marc Maurer), Norwegian update (from Karl Ove Hufthammer), Portuguese update, RPM spec update, and changed menu entries in two plugins. |
| matti | 9 | MSCV build environment updated. |
| phma | 3 | Dutch update from Marc Maurer. |
| msevior | 3 | Fix import of bulleted lists from MS Word docs, plus hack around a layout problem. |
| plam | 2 | LaTeX exporter hacked to support symbols. |
| hub | 2 | Fix CSS formatting error in HTML exporter, and commit changelog (from David Chart). |
| mpritchett | 2 | Attemt to fix Bug 1394. |
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 |
| uPOW | 2001.17 | Where to send AbiWord announcements |
| uPOW | 2001.09 | Determining Locale Status |
| uPOW | 2001.07 | Host for AbiWord BugDay |
| uPOW | 2001.06 | Update Feature and UI matrices |
| POW | 1999.47 | Make translated dialogs fit |
| uPOW | 1999.37 | CS folks wanted... |
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 able to program to do this.
Bug Counts
These are the bug counts for the past 4 weeks:
Date: Submitted: QA: Open: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.12.18 131 ( -7%) 115 ( -18%) 350 ( +0%) 2001.12.25 69 ( -47%) 91 ( -20%) 417 ( +19%) 2002.01.08 96 ( +39%) 131 ( +43%) 397 ( -4%) 2002.01.15 99 ( +3%) 175 ( +33%) 391 ( -1%)
Bug Votes
As a user of AbiWord, you are able to vote on bugs you'd like to see closed. The process is quite simple:
Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.
Bring up the bug list.
Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.
If you find an interesting bug you'd like to have fixed, cast your vote by clicking on the "Vote for this bug" link on the bug description page.
You have 30 voting points you can cast in whatever proportions you'd like on anything between 1 and 30 bugs. But note that developers will likely prioritize a bug with 30 single votes than a bug with a single 30-unit vote. So vote with lower unit counts (5 or so) to make your voice heard!
From the sorted list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1030 | Installing AbiWord messes up fonts in other applications (e.g. Netscape) | ||
| 376 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp | ||
| 1406 | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey | ||
| 1402 | Can not use other than original type1 fonts | ||
| 1046 | Some localized strings truncated in Windows version | ||
| 1781 | Toolbars do not remember position | ||
| 2317 | Added words to the custom.dic are not used to make suggestions | ||
| 1525 | Preferences -> Toolbars, Button Sytle, Both | ||
| 2083 | [RFE] Export WordPerfect format files |
And the Top 10 Requests For Enhancements to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1261 | Need to support footnotes and endnotes | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 2321 | Maths/Equation Editing, as a plugin maybe? | ||
| 1929 | Hyphenation is missing in Abiword | ||
| 1950 | Wish for automatic Table of Contents | ||
| 1262 | [RFE] need to rewrite RTF import | ||
| 1875 | Import of StarOffice Writer documents (*.sdw) | ||
| 2084 | Word Perfect graphics do not load as expected | ||
| 808 | Tables not imported from RTF |
Target Milestones
We are nominating bugs for the next two big releases. Users as well as developers, can have their say on which bugs to nominate by casting votes on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:
| Milestone | Bug count |
| Without Nomination | 181 |
| 1.0 | 80 |
| 1.2 | 32 |
| future | 212 |
Closed Bugs
Note that there are many many bugs just waiting for QA before they can be closed. Please help!
In the past week, the following 7 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed (FIXED/WORKSFORME) and verified):
On the Mailing List
Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled on about 200 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:
commit: Improve import of RTF bullet type lists: Martin started working on improving the RTF import of bullet type lists. Tomas followed up with changes to the MS Doc importer.
embedded objects: Francis James Franklin started what became a long thread on embedded objects.
proprietary plugins: Another long thread was about proprietary plugins, started by Rui Miguel Seabra.
Parsons is dying: Parson (being the server hosting www.abisource.com) is coughing up blood. Sourcegear has been very generous for hosting AbiWord for so long (and for making the initial code base open source, obviously), but it seems it's time we try to move to savannah.gnu.org.
DocBook with AbiWord?: Michael D. Crawford would like to use AbiWord for DocBook text editing. He's not alone :) Some believe it cannot be done (in a sensible way), but we'll see how close we can get over time.
post 1.0 layout engine: Tomas Frydrych would like to open the discussion on the post-1.0 layout engine. It's a good summary of issues that need to be considered.