Subject: Abiword Test - Woody
From: Michael Koehne (kraehe@copyleft.de)
Date: Tue Aug 22 2000 - 14:47:29 CDT
Hy folks,
I remembered AbiWord, while browsing over aptitude, so I took a look at it.
The first impression of the Woody version (0.7.8) was nice, Abiword is
published under GPL, its storing XML, it looks like if a windows user
could become conviced to migrate to XML content managment.
I've played around with language support, and saw that many of the
german menu's and items are not translated, I may add my help here,
but wait the debian version on the .com site is newer than the debian
version in my Woody ?
So I downloaded the 0.7.10 and played around with this version.
Now the german problems are fixed, but :
- AbiWord starts as 600x600, but it would need at least 900x600 to
display all of the toolbar icons of the second toolbar.
- There seams no way to define tables
- There seams no way to define lists
- 3 colums "3 Spalten" is crashing with a core dump
- undo is chrashing with a core dump
- the binary of the 0.7.10 debian package is striped, so its
not possible to eMail the gdb/bt to you ;-( and mailing a
core of a striped binary also doesnt make sense ;-)
Better use 3 toolbars, means split between point size and bold.
Use 800x540 to start right on systems that have 800x600 screens,
and provide a way to configure startup size and the toolbars.
I've seen that you provide a way to switch between inch and cm.
I hope you do not calculate in cm, but calculate in inch and scale
to cm as a last step. Using cm in typographics leads to rounding
errors.
AbiWord realy needs lists and tables to provide the minimal document
editor requirements.
I can also think that AbiWord would be perfect as a content management
system, if its possible to provide a schema file, to replace
"Normal,Header [1-3],{Plain|Block} Text" with something of meaning to
content management and fixed paragraph layout. The same should
be done to "Bold,Italic,Under,Over,Strike,Super,Sub", to mark things
important to content management.
So AbiWord could either be used as a scratchpad or with a schema file
to write things like letters, orders, invoices, ... - higher mysteries
like recalculation of invoices should be delegated to XSL - so a
vaporware /etc/AbiWord/schema/somedocumenttype.abischema needs some
way to name XML filters for actions apearing in the menu or toolbar.
I can not grant much of my time - I hope I find the time to compile
the CVS tree on my system to provide better bug reports as core dumps
are easy to hunt and fix for me ;-)
Bye Michael
-- mailto:kraehe@copyleft.de UNA:+.? 'CED+2+:::Linux:2.2.14'UNZ+1' http://www.xml-edifact.org/ CETERUM CENSEO MSDOS ESSE DELENDAM
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