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AbiWord Weekly News #83, (2001, week 9-10, released 2002.03.11)
Welcome to issue 83 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
More features completed, and many many Bugs fixed. As usual, we could use help testing Bugs in QA, so please dig in!
Since I was away last week, this issue of AWN summarizes news from the period 2002.02.25-2002.03.10 (weeks 9-10 of 2002).
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
| 2002.02.25 - 2002.03.10 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dom | 212 | Removed efence build dependency, complete file->new and fix context image dialog, Link Grammar Checker plugin, unload/remove edit method, scripthappy plugin, Word importer image fix (from row), fixed Bugs 947, 2261, 2774, and 2793. Fix GNOME toolbar color issue, updated some icons, C linkage for some header files, added 3 new templates, HRText exporter tweak, compound word spelling support, German localization (from Christian Meyer), fix unix toolbar bug, importer heuristics, doc scripts update (from Calvin Arndt), fix spelling in Image dialog, updated some credits, AbiGDK plugin fix, and strcpy/sprint/strcat removal from importers/exporters. |
| dchart | 146 | Documentation. |
| msevior | 71 | Fixed RTF field export/import segfault, fix autoindent bug, fixed header/footer undo crash, tweaks to RTF field export, insert file segfault and screen dirt fixed, fix header/footer creation assertion, fixed cut/copy/paste of resized images, fixed resize image dialog. Fixed Bugs 1389, 1428, 1679, 1997, 2102, 2239, 2600, 2748, 2778, 2815, 2817, and 2849. |
| mpritchett | 53 | Fixed Win32 memory error, updates to template dialog, libiconv win32 build fix, fixed zoom failure caused by incremental loader, fix win32 compile errors, win32 image dialog, win32 incremental loader support, win32 aiksaurus plugin changes, aiksaurus win32 build changes. Fixed Bugs 2689, 2714, 2723, 2751, 2768, 2797, 2819, 2841, and 2845. |
| hub | 42 | SunOS build flags, add ut_unixDirent.cpp to makefiles, partial fix for Bug 1406, XHTML debug support and descriptive list support, plus many Cocoa changes: splash screen graphics, list dialog, build fixes, GTK time disabled, fixed memory management bug, better event binding, cursor changes, and other stuff. |
| fjfranklin | 29 | de-CH/fi-FI RPM script update (from Gabriel Gerhardsson), Swiss dictionary (from Alex Schroeder), unix locale fix for Darwin, compound handling fix (from Per Larsson), finnish spelling support, fixed Bug 2806, fixed libxml2 woes, plugin autoskip fixes, RPM module list updated, copyright year updated. |
| phma | 14 | Danish strings (from Birger Langkjer), Polish tooltips (from Andrzej Pruszynski), Swiss German strings (from Alex Schroeder), Slovak update (from Martin Lacko), Japanese update (from Masayuki Hatta), and Czech update (from Radek Vybiral) |
| rms | 5 | Chinese update (from Anthony Fok), RPM spec tweaks, PT updated to 100%. |
| kian | 4 | Type fix, BeOS UT_ASSERT Dialog implementation. |
| jskov | 1 | Fix SIGFPE and disable some debug output. |
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: ---------------------------------------------------- 2002.02.18 113 ( +0%) 148 ( +0%) 391 ( +0%) 2002.02.25 141 ( +24%) 168 ( +13%) 388 ( +0%) 2002.03.04 162 ( +14%) 162 ( -3%) 390 ( +0%) 2002.03.11 142 ( -12%) 86 ( -46%) 394 ( +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 that can be cast in units of 1 to 30. But please only use votes in 5, 10, or 15-unit blocks (on a single Bug) and avoid casting votes on Bugs you have reported yourself.
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 | ||
| 1124 | Does not honor config/-geometry request | ||
| 1406 | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg | ||
| 1271 | Postscript print formatting incorrect and inconsistent | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey | ||
| 1402 | Can not use other than original type1 fonts | ||
| 1545 | Help only works for localizations en-US es-ES fr-FR | ||
| 1046 | Some localized strings truncated in Windows version | ||
| 2598 | Abiword installs bogus fonts of dubious heritage |
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 | ||
| 2183 | Compatibility with StarOffice XML | ||
| 1270 | Abiword should graphical columns ala wordperfect 8/9 | ||
| 1262 | [RFE] need to rewrite RTF import | ||
| 1875 | Import of StarOffice Writer documents (*.sdw) |
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 | 246 |
| 1.0 | 79 |
| 1.2 | 30 |
| future | 214 |
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 75 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed (FIXED/WORKSFORME) and verified):
608, 918, 922, 1311, 1319, 1344, 1359, 1387, 1389, 1413, 1422, 1426, 1462, 1477, 1538, 1548, 1614, 1872, 1915, 1941, 1957, 1984, 2025, 2046, 2052, 2102, 2124, 2147, 2231, 2261, 2290, 2307, 2317, 2334, 2337, 2371, 2407, 2419, 2437, 2470, 2475, 2500, 2509, 2512, 2534, 2562, 2568, 2569, 2576, 2578, 2581, 2600, 2605, 2613, 2642, 2653, 2662, 2675, 2688, 2691, 2703, 2707, 2725, 2728, 2731, 2748, 2769, 2778, 2791, 2807, 2810, 2814, 2817, 2841, 2849,
Latest Releases
Here are links to the latest official releases of AbiWord for various architectures and operating systems. There are also links to the latest snapshot builds of AbiWord for a subset of the 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.
AbiWord 0.99.2 - Release Notes
AbiWord 0.9.4 - Release Notes
AbiWord Snapshots
Linux/GNOME (i386/RPM): Provided by Marc Maurer. These are updated daily. Plugins, clip art, fonts and help files are available too.
Win32 (i386/exe): Provided by Jeremy Davis. These are updated twice a day. Plugins are available too.
Win32 (i386/exe): 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 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: import architecture now uses complex heuristics: Dom has improved AbiWord's detection of documents. Still some tweaks to do, but on the whole it's an improvement.
commit - Win32 Incremental Loader: Michael added incremental loader support to the Windows platform. Also did lots of other good Win32 stuff during the two weeks.
commit: Fix image resizing: Martin completed the image resizing work started by Dom and Hub. This is really nice!
using FreeType post 1.0: Tomas started this thread, suggesting we start using FreeType for rendering after 1.0. Tomas feels it would plug in without too much trouble, and FreeType is cross-platform, so is a good candidate for a rendering backend. About one year ago, we discussed using Pango, but the consensus of the thread is that FreeType will be a better solution for AbiWord.
Word order in translation: Pierre Abbat asked the obvious: can the order of (substituted) words in a translation be changed. And the answer is unfortunately no. Maybe something we should fix in the future, so non-English languages can use an optimal translation, rather than one that makes use of the provided words/data in the required sequence.
Current en-US Documentation: Calvin Arndt took on the POW of getting the new documentation integrated in AbiWord. Great progress has been made, I believe. Doing this work, Calvin has suggested some procedures for how AbiWord documentation should be written.
Weird text position while typing in AbiWord >= 0.99.?: Anthony Fok is having problems with the line breaker when writing Chinese text. There's a neat animated gif showing the problem - and what AbiWord looks like when used for Chinese. Interesting. Problem has not been resolved though, but Anthony now knows where to look.
Special Interest --
From time to time, this section will contain essay-style text about various special interests of the AbiWord development.