Subject: Re: GNOME Foundation/Gnome Status report
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Aug 18 2000 - 17:18:41 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 :-)
This is great Dom! Thanks very much.
>
> >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 know little about XML file formats but I do remember that bonobo was
explicitly designed to be close to MicroSoft OLE. (That was a smart move
by the way but caused much gnashing of teeth amongst some OS bigots.) If
you design the hooks to be right for embedding bonobo objects that's got
be pretty close to what's needed for MS. That is basically whats needed.
So I guess if you get bonobo right we've almost got Windows for free.
Maybe that and other platforms could be done with a little tweaking.
>
> 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.
>
They could also be sent a document with a gnumeric spread sheet or a
vector graphic image. Spreadsheets and Vectore graphics for those
platforms won't happen within a year (maybe much longer) we should not
hold abi back on gnome until all platforms get thet gnome apps.
> 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.
>
Too bad I had hoped to be able to use the lovely print-preview feature.
> Finally, I'm also investigating
> using the GnomeCanvas as our rendering engine (in a gr_UnixGnomeGraphics and
> ap_UnixGnomeFrame or some such beast).
>
This very interesting and cool. This sounds like a really good set of
motives Dom. Thanks for keeping us informed!
Cheers
Martin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Fri Aug 18 2000 - 17:19:29 CDT