Subject: Re: Gnome parts in AbiWord (was Re: GNOME Foundation/Gnome Status)
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Aug 18 2000 - 17:01:26 CDT
On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> >
> > 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.
> Canvas support would be cool, IMO. Supporting the canvas would most likely
> take care of at least some of the redraw and scrolling problems Abiword on
> Unix has.
I think so too. It would not be very hard to implement either I think. At
least I think I could do it myself except that Lists seems to be a
ever-ending job. I would love to fix the re-draw/scroll problems. That is
what slows abi down on Unix.
>
> >
> > 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'm aware of this, but didn't feel the need for a dissortation in my
> previous email.
Yeah but this would only be useful to platforms with gnumeric and/or excel
anyway. We shouldn't aim to do the world in one go. Just adding the
capability to Abiword doesn't decrease the usability on the other
platforms and if the hooks are in place there is more incentive to get
gnumeric ported.
Once we get embedding in abi correct the gnome version of abi becomes
expontially more featurful than the other platforms anyway. We can use
EOG to view arbitary image formats, guppi to display graphs, Vector
graphics support from GILL etc etc.
While I would love to see all platforms get these features realistically
its got to happen on gnome first. If that is the case we might as well
just do it.
Actually I think the most useful bonobo-isation of abi would be to be
able to embed it in other apps. I just played with the nautilus file
manager which embeds mozilla. It's very cool but it can't read my
*.abw,*.rtf and *.doc files. An embeddable abi would do that. Similarly
people are always sending me *.doc files via email. I'd love to able to
read then in evolution via an embedable abi component.
>
> >
> > 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.
> I thought that GDK-pixbuf only rendered to GdkDrawables and not to an
> arbitrary backend, though, and wasn't meant for image conversion. I'll have
> to investigate into this more.
>
Paul Rohr thought about this a lot and I believe that what he wanted was a
gdk-pixbuf like front end for abi that would call up arbitary image
conversion libraries from either platform libraries (gnome,BeOS, Win,Mac)
or abi if those libaries were not present. This infrastructure was never
put in place.
> > 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.
> Don't forget about the gdk dependency, and the fact that my glib port was
> *bare bones*. Sure, glib, gdk and gtk work on windows and mac and beos. So
> does libart. And so will gdk-pixbuf when gtk-2.0 comes out with it as a
> dependency. So do we make libart, the *real* glib, gdk, and gdk-pixbuf
> required XP? Then why don't we do what the gimp does and build with Gtk on
> every platform. That'd save some development time. Whoops, there goes the
> Abi framework.
We've had this discussion many times. If Abi can use the gnome embedable
utilities to do arbitary image viewing, it should. This keeps Abi lean in
situations where it needs to be (think QNX powered fridges or framebuffer
gtk) and leverages the gnome apps to provide the featureful Word Processor
the Gnome folks want to compete with Kword and commercial WP's. The gnome
hackers should lead the way and the other platforms can add the
functionality as they can. This the method we've adopted for dialogs, (Not
that gnome or gtk always leads here!) we should do the same for embedding.
Once its in place the other platforms can study the code. Maybe parts can
be moved to XP, maybe not, for now lets make it platfrom specific to
gnome.
Cheers
Martin
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