Subject: AbiWord 0.7.9
From: Eric W. Sink (eric@sourcegear.com)
Date: Fri Apr 28 2000 - 15:17:51 CDT
... is out.
It's been a while since the 0.7.8 release. With all of the new
features and bug fixes in 0.7.9, this summary is a long note. This
release also saw quite an expansion of our CREDITS file, as 13 new
contributors joined the effort. There is much to highlight in this
release, so we apologize up front if we didn't mention everyone.
Selected highlights since 0.7.8 include:
1. Insert Symbol. AbiWord now allows you to add symbols via a nifty
Insert Symbol dialog. Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
needed to be able to use all those goofy Greek symbols that represent
particle names such as anti-protons and neutrinos, so he added the dialog
and all of the infrastructure to make it work. This was a real team effort
to get the dialog refined and cross-platform. Thanks to Joaquín Cuenca
Abela and Bruce Pearson.
2. Word count dialog. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (who goes by Sam Th) added
a Word count dialog. He must have gotten tired of being assigned a
1,000 word essay, and submitting one with 1,100. Why write an extra
100 words when you can code a feature to make sure you don't have to
anymore? :-)
3. Insert Field. Henrik Berg added an Insert Field dialog. This
feature is currently not fully enabled, due to pending changes in the
underlying fields implementation.
4. Two major bug fixes. The first was the infamous libpng bug.
Everyone who grabbed the latest Red Hat 6.2 distribution couldn't run
AbiWord. This was due to the way we were accessing the new PNG
library. Justin Bradford and Sam Th got tired of answering emails on
the subject, so they fixed it. The second was #522, where font size
popups would activate when you hit the space bar. Shaw figured out
the problem was due to some improper handing of modifier keys such as
NumLock.
5. Overwrite mode. Alexey Sinutin added the ability to run AbiWord
in overwrite mode. Now the Insert key will toggle overwrite mode,
replacing characters as you type instead of always inserting them.
6. Page Margins. Bruce Pearson added the ability to set right and left
page margins from the ruler.
7. Lots of Gnome dialogs. Gnome version of the Font chooser,
Paragraph, About and Option dialog came courtesy of John Tunison. We
didn't quite get all of our ducks in a row here for the build farm
here at SourceGear, so there are no Gnome binaries for 0.7.9.
However, they *will* be available in the next release, which will come
much sooner than this last one.
8. Mac port beginning. Bryan Prusha makes his AbiWord debut by getting
the Macintosh version of AbiWord compiling. It doesn't actually *do*
anything yet, but it compiles. Thanks to Bryan, it's now time for all
Macintosh developers who like GUI work to knock themselves out.
9. Various other bug fixes. Double click selection fix #10 (Sam Th),
Ruler and Undo instantiation fix #302 (Aaron Lehmann), Toolbar button
size when text only #352 (Henrik Berg) Cursor size on font size
boundaries #432 (Martin Sevior), Printing on 2nd page #637 (Andy
Richardson), Opening empty files #651 (Matt Kraai), Mouse Wheel scroll
lines support #770, (Matthew Allen), Cursor motion fix #776 (Martin
Sevior), better error handling on tar extraction #782 (Danny Faught)
LaTeX export fixes #788 and #789 (Joaquín Cuenca Abela), ANSI C
cleanup #811 (Sam Th), underline/superscript fix (Martin Sevior), View
Ruler consistency (Kevin Vajk), RTF CR/LF handing (Harald Fernengel)
10. AbiWord for QNX. Thomas Fletcher (thomasf@qnx.com) has done a
tremendous amount of work to get AbiWord nearly fully functional on
QNX. As a measure of his success, AbiWord may soon be shipping as
part of the QNX Neutrino RTOS and the Photon microGUI windowing
system. Note that we are not yet providing binaries for QNX.
11. Command line conversions. AbiWord can now be used in batch mode to
convert files from one format to another. Joaquín Cuenca Abela added all
the options. To get a complete list, type AbiWord -help from a command
prompt.
12. Update to expat 1.1. You would have though Sam Th had already gone
above and beyond, but he somehow found time to update our XML parser to
version 1.1. This paves the way for better XML support.
13. Translation updates. Typically translators fall behind current
releases due to the large number of strings which are constantly
added. Owen Stenseth took the high road and decided to rectify this
problem by providing a script which surveys the code base, and prints
out a table of translations, and how complete they are. This led to a
flurry of updates including Swedish (Henrik Berg), Italian (Marco
Innocenti), Finnish (Jarmo Karvonen), Indonesian (Tim Allen), Danish
(Birger Langkjer), Portuguese (Rui Silva and Giovanni dos Reis Nunes),
Hungarian (Tamas Decsi), and Polish (Eutanazy Sercxemulo) [but it
doesn't appear that this Polish translation got checked into the tree
-- oops, we'll take care of it].
14. More ports. drk@sgi.com sent us a patch to get AbiWord building on
SGI IRIX 6.x. For an even stranger platform, AbiWord can now build the GTK
version on Win32 via gcc and cygwin, courtesy of Tom Newton. If that
weren't enough, a NetBSD configuration was provided by Johnny C. Lam
For those who want a brief look at what is coming, there are some really
cool patches just over the horizon. Christopher Charon has written a great
help system, James Montgomerie has started the Word export feature and a
patch arrived for Bidirectional support from Tomas Frydrych. All this and
more coming soon.
-- Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman SourceGear Corporation eric@sourcegear.com
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