Subject: Re: [Patch] Psiconv TextEd and Word importer
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Dec 19 2000 - 17:54:58 CST
On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Frodo Looijaard wrote:
> Martin Sevior wrote:
> >
> > The code looks really nice and I'm sure will be useful to people
> > with Psions. I've applied your patch and built your library. Abi builds
> > fine.
>
> That's good to hear! On what platform?
>
Redhat 6.2, which is not a particularly hard test I guess...
> > Where can I find some Psion word files to test the importer with?
>
> I'll upload some tonight and give you an URL.
>
> > Also, if you want this to be part of the official Abi build we will have
> > to fork your Psion libaray and put it in the abi tree. Do you want to do
> > this?
>
> I have been thinking about this, as Dom said the same. License-wise there
> is no problem - libpsiconv is GPL'ed. So the only thing to do would be
> to synchronise both CVS archives (is there a way to do this automatically?)
There apperently is a way but we haven't discovered it yet.
> and to change the built system slightly (though wv also uses autoconf
> and friends, so I guess you are not opposed to using this outside the
> abi tree). So I think it might be a good idea, provided you think it
> is worth the trouble - and it would make AbiWord the first Word Processor
> ever (that I know of) with native Psion import filters!
I think the whole synchronize with PDA thing is a very useful part of the
desktop experience. I've heard that Psions are more popular than Palms in
Europe so there must be a large number of users who can use it. Being able
to easily exchange documents with one's PDA has got be a useful use of a
word processor. For various Marketing reasons MS does not want to do this
so it's a great niche for Abi to fill on all platforms.
Ordinary Windows and Mac users might use Abi for just this alone.
Plus I haven't given up hope that Abi will adopted by a PDA manufacturer,
in which case being able to read and write numerous PDA formats would be a
huge plus.
So yes I think we should have native Psion import (and export). I'd love
to have native Palmdoc import to go with our Palmdoc export capabilities.
>
> Another option would be to make the AbiWord CVS archive the primary
> psiconv CVS archive - but I do not want to split the psiconv tool and
> the Psion documentation from the primary archive, so there would be
> some things in the tree that would not be used by AbiWord.
>
It's probabally better to have a well maintained library in Abi that you
periodically update from your "bleeding edge" library elsewhere. This
seems to work for wv.
> > By the way we have support for header/footers and styles in abi. We just
> > haven't finished implementing the GUI dialogs to drive them.
>
> I could not find the import mechanisms for it; if somebody can point
> me in the right direction, I will be very happy (same for importing
> bulleted paragraphs).
>
We haven't implemented these on any other than our native import/export
file formats yet. I think your best bet is to look at ie_imp_AbiWord_1 and
some *.abw files with header/footer/lists/styles in them.
Looking forward to those Psion files :-)
Cheers
Martin
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