Subject: GNOME Foundation/Gnome Status report
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Aug 18 2000 - 09:06:40 CDT
I *am* willing to volunteer for the job too. There's no rule saying that,
say, both Sam and I (or any number of other developers) can't do it together
though. I could always use the help :-)
Sam said:
>1) AbiWord is one of the few GNOME office applications not developed in
>house (along with the GIMP). This means that we already have much less of
>a voice than say the Gnumeric folks.
I couldn't agree more. We really don't get much attention from Gnome hackers
for various reasons, esp. the "main" hackers such the guys at Helix, et. al.
I can't say that I like that much, but I guess that Abiword isn't an
"in-house" project so you end up getting Joaquin and myself instead :)
>2) Despite being the only GNOME-enabled WP around, we could be much more
>integrated with GNOME, which would be a very good thing. However, we
>can't let this ompromise our XP capability.
:-) That's what I'm working on. Actually, we use a lot of Gnome components
already. We use gtk, every gnome-widget we can get our hands on and the
following 3 things on all platforms: glib, libole2, and gnome-xml2
(conditionally). What we're majorly lacking (from my POV) is Bonobo support
and use of the gnome-print backend (and to a lesser degree, the gnome canvas
and gdk-pixbuf).
Some minimal bonobo support would be easy to achieve, but Abiword's file
format (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't have support for embedding
objects/data, such as spreadsheets, arbitrary images, etc.. which we could
then render using bonobo on Gnome or OLE2 on Win32. I want to make sure that
this feature will be implemented correctly XP because we all know Windows
can do object embedding too (Chris: what can BeOS do?). And then do we just
abandon normal Gtk support, or make bonobo a requirement for the Gtk port
too? Then why not require the rest of Gnome too and be done with it? And
then what happens on QNX? I'm not wholly clear on the right direction to
take here.
As for gdk-pixbuf, we could hook that up nicely. But then someone on Unix
could create a document with, say, an embedded GIF that's not visible by an
Abi user on Win32 or Be using the same version... that sucks. A better
solution is needed here.
Our printing structure really doesn't lend itself too well to using a lot of
gnome-print's features, but I'm working on fixing that. Also, the current PS
engine works great so I'm in no hurry to replace/recode it to use
gnome-print. I do have some stuff to re-implement a few PS methods using
gnome-print in my tree now, though. I also want to use GnomeFont from the
gnome-print package, since it'll give us access to more fonts on unix as
well as its having lightning-fast routines to calculate widths, heights,
etc... of strings. The only problem here is the use of the AbiFontInfo
struct used during PS printing that's generated using afmParseFile(check out
xap_UnixFont.[cpp|h]). By not supplying this structure, printing in its
current form on Unix-Gnome would most likely be horribly broken. XP PS would
probably solve this problem for me nicely. Finally, I'm also investigating
using the GnomeCanvas as our rendering engine (in a gr_UnixGnomeGraphics and
ap_UnixGnomeFrame or some such beast).
>
>For all there reasons, we very much need a voice. As I said, I volunteer,
>but there may be others more qualified (our GNOME developers, for
>example). However, this is important for AbiWord as a part of GNOME.
I volunteer if someone else does too. I won't be of much use there until
school starts back up and I feel that, currently, my time would be better
spent working on Gnome integration and Word97 export.
Dom
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