AbiWord Weekly News #99, (2002, week 27, released 2002.07.08)

Welcome to issue 99 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

Development wise, there's been a few nice changes this week: tables now have lines and ruler controls, the WP importer handles tables, some more work was done on the Cocoa and QNX ports, the AbiPaint plugin was updated and Basque translation was added. And there was the usual bunch of bug fixes.

In other news, I've made a decision to try and make AbiWord Weekly News subscription based when returning from my honeymoon. The problem with the current state of affairs is basically lack of expressed appreciation from readers, making me question if editing AWN is worth my time and diminishing enthusiasm. I tried explaining why, and how things will change, in this email and addressed a couple of questions here. If you have comments or questions to this, or can think of a way to avoid it, please send mail to the user mailing list (you have to be subscribed to do that) or directly to me. Please prefix subject with [AWN]. I will maintain a Wiki page here with interesting feedback I might get (and my replies).

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. Basque (Euskara) Translation: Alfredo Barrainkua Zallo has provided Basque translation files for AbiWord.

2. UnixNull_Graphics??: Joaquín wondered what the UnixNull_Graphics class is used for. As was explained by Martin, it's used for the AbiCommand plugin which allows AbiWord to be used from scripts as any other command line tool available on Unix boxen. The plugin is still not complete as it does not allow the user to control all aspects of AbiWord, but if you need control of a particular feature it is fairly easy to add.

3. Intending to make AbiWord Weekly News subscription based: AbiWord Weekly News will shortly take a break until September. The plan is to relaunch AWN as a subscription based newsletter (US$3/quarter). I also posted a followup to address a couple of questions I had been asked.

4. font substitution: Joaquín wondered about how to handle documents which rely on fonts not available on the box. The necessary thing to do is of course to substitute with another font (that is available), but when the document is saved again, should the saved file require the original font or the substitute font? This resulted in a fairly long thread.

5. French review of AbiWord: According to Hub, they found it lacking drag and drop text editing and other stuff (including table support, of course).

6. commit: Lines around tables: Those who saw the snapshot Martin posted of his table work may have wondered what happened to the lines. Well, Martin just added them. He also added rulers to control cell layout.

7. Commit (HEAD): WordPerfect Table Import: Marc made the WordPerfect importer handle tables, making it the first non-AbiWord format for which we support (reading) tables.

Special Interest --

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