AbiWord Weekly News #91, (2002, week 19, released 2002.05.13)
Welcome to issue 91 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
This week development on the next major version of AbiWord really took off. And AbiWord 1.0.1 was officially announced.
I've decided to take out the section with POWs since there has not been made any new ones for a really long time. Hopefully someone will bring them back to life as they attracted new developers while they were being actively maintained, yours truly inclusive.
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| CVS checkins 2002.05.06 - 2002.05.12 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| tomas_f | 336 | Added Pango sources, removed BiDi ifdefs, some Pango integration work. |
| dom | 266 | Fixed wv password problem, fixed XML property of .abw exporter, abiwidget/Nautilus stuff, build fixes, bonobo stuff, GTK2 work, sign fix, ut_hash cleanup, abiwidget work and a segv fix. Fixed Bugs 3252, 3295 (maybe), and 3301. |
| plam | 28 | libfribidi build issue, fix segfault, cocoa popt work, XP command line improvements, expat/libxml2 cleanup, ut_mutex fix, comment out some broken Nautilus support, cocoa timer implementation, UCS4 fixes for cocoa, fixed 'make clean', and fixed Bug 3215. |
| mpritchett | 28 | Convert from expat to libxml2, win32 build fixes and win32 popt work. |
| uwog | 22 | Fixed UCS and compile errors in HTML, KWORD and MsWrite, Applix, ClasisWorks, URLDict, BableFish, Wikipedia, AikSaurus, AbiCommand, WordPerfect and FreeTranslation plugins. |
| msevior | 17 | Added base class for next generation containers, next gen layout documentaion, added basics for a Nautilus viewer, and fixed diving build for GNOME. |
| fjfranklin | 15 | autoconf platform detection, autoconf tweaks, hash file downloader tweaks (from Gabriel). |
| biesi | 15 | libole2 path (from Jeremy), SDW importer work. |
| dchart | 15 | ChangeLog update, framework for plugin documentation, and info files for MSDI. |
| jeremyd | 6 | Win32 cmdline work, and a libole2 tweak. |
| rms | 1 | RPM spec tweaks. |
| jskov | 1 | Simplified some fv_View code. |
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.
Bug Statistics
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 |
| 1030 | 333 | Future | Installing AbiWord messes up fonts in other applications (e.... |
| 1402 | 95 | Future | Can not use other than original type1 fonts |
| 376 | 79 | 1.2 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp |
| 1124 | 69 | 1.2 | Does not honor config/-geometry request |
| 1406 | 48 | 1.0.x | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg |
| 3171 | 45 | 1.0.x | rtf sets top and bottom margins to 0 |
| 1747 | 42 | 1.2 | background colour of text selection is always grey |
| 2598 | 36 | 1.2 | Abiword installs bogus fonts of dubious heritage |
| 1194 | 30 | 1.2 | alt+xxxx does not insert special symbols |
| 465 | 24 | Future | Haettenschweiler font doesn't draw with correct spacing when... |
| 1818 | 20 | --- | Font reverts to Times New Roman when it shouldn't |
| 1394 | 17 | 1.2 | on-screen landscape actually prints portrait in Win95 |
| 2299 | 15 | Future | Prints incorrect margins with split page. |
| 372 | 15 | Future | consolidate identical platform code |
| 2868 | 15 | 1.2 | character widths are not calculated correctly for some fonts... |
| 1865 | 13 | --- | Header/footer not loaded properly from .doc |
| 2962 | 12 | 1.2 | Printer problems with Lexmark printers on Windows |
| 1474 | 11 | 1.2 | libiconv Korean broken |
| 2275 | 10 | 1.2 | dbk not valid after save |
| Top 20 Requests For Enhancement | |||
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | 793 | 1.2 | Table support |
| 1261 | 418 | Future | Need to support footnotes and endnotes |
| 2321 | 218 | Future | [RFE] Maths/Equation Editing, as a plugin maybe? |
| 2183 | 105 | --- | Fully Support OpenOffice's XML file format |
| 1374 | 66 | Future | [RFE] print odd and/or even pages only (for front & back pri |
| 2365 | 53 | Future | AbiWord needs 'view codes' |
| 1950 | 42 | Future | Wish for automatic Table of Contents |
| 1929 | 41 | Future | Hyphenation is missing in Abiword |
| 1144 | 32 | Future | Improve KWord import/export filters |
| 515 | 25 | Future | columns change should only affect selected text |
| 1270 | 23 | Future | Abiword should graphical columns ala wordperfect 8/9 |
| 2296 | 22 | Future | doc import: footnotes |
| 2219 | 22 | Future | AUTONUM wanted in [ Insert/Field/Number ] menu |
| 2169 | 21 | Future | Line numbering |
| 2360 | 20 | Future | Resizing bitmap images |
| 2294 | 20 | Future | Tool palette instead of toolbars |
| 1525 | 20 | Future | Preferences -> Toolbars, Button Style, Both |
| 2462 | 19 | Future | [rfe] Add true EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) support |
| 1262 | 18 | 1.2 | [RFE] need to rewrite RTF import |
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.
| Bugs Closed This Week | |
| Bug ID | Description |
| 3215 | justified list item not justified + asserts |
| 3252 | Abi adds superfluous language properties to files |
| This Week's 5 Most Active QA Helpers | |
| Closed | Name |
| 1 | Hubert Figuiere |
| 1 | linux@dchart.demon.co.uk |
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.
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://pinohuis.dhs.org/uwog/abiword/ | Provided by Marc Maurer. These are updated daily. Plugins, clip art, fonts and help files are available too. |
| 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:
commit HEAD: Pango stuff: People are being active: Tomas has started commiting Pango stuff, ...
Commit: start of GTK2 port: .. Dom started on the GTK2 porting, ...
Commit: Beginnings of Plug-in documentation: .. and David started preparing documentation for all the new plugins. Good to see the documentation keeping track of the development :)
Commit: Bonobo PropertyBag stuff: Dom has also been improving the bonobo support. AbiWord is now an embeddable, printable, persistent, zoomable, configurable GNOME control. Very nice!
IMPORTANT: proposed removal of non-bidi code: Tomas suggested removing the non-BiDi paths of the code. After some explanations in the thread, he went ahead and committed the changes. That means all users will be using the same version of AbiWord in the future, reducing clutter of the source, and avoiding bugs hiding in the least used paths of the old separate builds.
Stable branch maintainer: TBD will be the maintainer of the stable branch. His job will be to make sure bug fixes are applied to the 1.0.x branch and coordinate new releases when appropriate. This will leave the trunk of the "development tree" for major changes.
AbiWord 1.0.1 released: This is the official announcement from Martin. The news also reached slashdot.
Special Interest --
From time to time, this section will contain essay-style text about various special interests of the AbiWord development.
| At your discretion, pay $0.10 (or more if you want) for the AWN you have just been reading. The money go to the editor, Jesper Skov (jskov@zoftcorp.dk). | Help promote AbiWord development by donating money. The money go to a general AbiWord "fund", presently hosted by Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com). |
| In order to donate money, you must have a PayPal account. If you do not already have one, the links above will allow you to open one. Please consider putting jskov@zoftcorp.dk or cinamod@hotmail.com in the "Referral ID" field, which results in a one-time $5 donation from PayPal (to AWN or AbiWord respectively). Note that if you donate by a credit card transaction (as opposed to from a PayPal account), only donations of $3 or more are of interest. Sorry, this is due to the fees imposed by credit card companies and PayPal. | |