Subject: Re: GNOME Foundation/Gnome Status report
From: sam th (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Fri Aug 18 2000 - 16:29:12 CDT
On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> 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 :-)
Well, I am confident that you're the better candidate, but if they want
more than one of us ... If you know who to contact, that ould be
appreciated.
>
> 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 :)
Well, far be it from me to complain about both of your contributions. I
only wish we go more recognition from people in the opn source community,
given that we produce one of only two open source WP.
>
> >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.
>
I think it's clear that embedding can't currently be done in an XP way.
This is simply a reality of other applications lack of the vision that we
have. Thi means two things
1) I think its more important for AbiWord to be embaddable in other apps,
since this is far less likely to pollute our file formats.
2) It's still important to be able to embed things on our various
platforms, but we will have to be careful about how we do it.
One question - how does MS work embedding on the Mac?
> 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 think a much better solution would be to just display GIFs by converting
them to PNG, which avoids patent issues and would work XP.
>
> >
> >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.
Well, I'm anxious for us to have representation, but if you want the job,
it's yours.
sam th
sam@uchicago.edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam
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