AbiWord Weekly News #93, (2002, week 21, released 2002.05.27)

Welcome to issue 93 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

Continued work on new features and fixing of various Bugs. Seems we're just trucking along, making good progress.

In this issue:

• CVS Stats
• Bug Update
• Latest Releases
• On the Mailing List
• Special Interest

Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov

CVS Stats

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. How can I forward a translation for the help documentation ?: Gilles Saint-Denis translated the AbiWord documentation into French! Cool! Let's have more of those, please!

2. Commit:HEAD More framework for Tables.: Martin has been plugging away at the table support. See the special interest section this week for a quick overview of features to come.

3. Release 1.0.2 attempt: Hub is planning a new stable release of AbiWord, but there are still some outstanding issues that need to be fixed. Hopefully the release will be announced in early June.

4. Feedback from tucows: Martin submitted the Windows version of AbiWord to tocows.com, and got the review and scores back. There are some things in the pipeline which will improve the score.

5. Announce: intent to work on GTK+2 port: Dom has started working on the GKT+2 port. For avoidance of doubt; it's possible for the GTK+2 and GTK+(1) environments to co-exist, so this will not require developers to update their computers to use (unstable) GTK+2 as the primary toolkit. Dom later posted a simple porting guide for GTK+2.

6. Commit: beginning of dialog help system: Dom added help properties to dialogs, which will allow pop-up help for dialogs in the future.

7. commit HEAD: revisions -- another dialogue: After several commits during the week, Tomas finally posted a snapshot of the revisions dialog. Very nice stuff! And it's been done in a real hurry too - discussions on the subject started only last week.

Special Interest -- Next generation layout for AbiWord - By Martin Sevior

The AbiWord team is currently implementing its next generation Layout code. The idea of course is to rewrite as little as possible of our current code. This new layout code will be able to handle all the layout structures available in MicroSoft Word and the more advanced layout programs such as provided by Latex. In particular we will handle Tables with rows spanning multiple columns and columns spanning multiple rows, Nested Tables, Tables spanning many pages, same row on the top of every page of the table, Numerical values as the sum of rows and columns, Footnotes, Endnotes, Margin notes, Text Frames and other positioned objects. Text will automatically flow around images and other embedded objects. In addition we plan to provide full support for embedded bonobo objects like Gnumeric, Charts from Guppi and maybe Math using GtkMathView.

Since AbiWord is an Objected Oriented program written in C++, it has been easy to re-factorour previous layout code to work in the new more general framework we need for these sophisticated constructs. This refactoring has been completed and it works. Right now we're working on the code to actually implement Tables. Much of this code has been borrowed from the Table implementation of the Gtk+ toolkit so we know it works and we know it is fast. Tables are layed out at rate proportional to number of rows plus number of columns.

I expect to get a basic table displayed with the new framework by the end of this week and hope to have a quality beta in about 3 months. However all this is contingent on how much time the AbiWord hackers get to work on the project. Nevertheless we know exactly how to do the features listed so it's is really just a matter of finding the time to implement them.