Subject: Gnome parts in AbiWord (was Re: GNOME Foundation/Gnome Status)
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Fri Aug 18 2000 - 12:02:27 CDT
At 10:06 AM -0400 8/18/00, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>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).
Bonobo and gnome-print make a lot of sense. I don't see,
however, any immediate benefits from using canvas and gdk-pixbuf - at
least not without starting to enter x-platform problems.
>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.
It's a MUCH larger problem than that - you not only need to
carry that actual data, BUT also information about the "link", and
that information is NOT going to go XP. Even if we go the data to
go across (and hooked up OLE support on Wintel), there are issues
about how to get embedded Gnumeric data to work with Excel and then
back again.
>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?).
Glad to hear that you're concerned about it. Then there's
the issue about platforms (Mac OS, QNX) that don't have embedding
support.
>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.
I don't see the connection here. You could use gdk-pixbuf to
load in GIF/TIFF/etc, but you'd want/need to convert it to PNG since
that's the native image format of AbiWord. Then there's the issue
that other platforms wouldn't get those features.
HOWEVER, since gdk-pixbuf sits on top of glib which we've
already ported, it should be trivial to just incorporate gdk-pixbuf
into our tree and use it on all platforms (though we'd probably also
have to carry libTIFF, libJPEG, etc.). Also, gdk-pixbuf uses some
parts of libart, but I've already ported it to Windows (and Mac OS)
and sent changes to Raph.
Leonard
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