Subject: Re: [Patch] Psiconv TextEd and Word importer
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2000 - 14:19:44 CST
TF wrote:
>Yes well we might have some fat trimming to do first. Our footprint (both
>runtime and exectable size) are a little on the big size ... we might be
>smaller than others, but we aren't _that_ much smaller =;-) Adding in
>things like STL and additional libraries (ie this psion library) doesn't
>help either.
Actually, we are orders of magnitude smaller than most of the rest... My
MSWord install was 300MB. Corel's WP for linux was an 85MB download.
StarOffice is about the same. And I've compared our STL and non-STL builds
on linux. We're talking about a few _bytes_, IIRC.
As for a modular importer/exporter structure, I have mixed feelings on it.
It would be nice to have modular importers & exporters and to be able to
just drop a importer/exporter DLL in and then have AbiWord just "run". Then
again, Abi can't run without certain filters (RTF comes to mind).
Then again, importer/exporters really *don't* add that much bloat to our
code. We're talking about files that are generally less than 1,000 LOC. If
you're looking to do this just to reduce our binary size by 5k per filter, I
think that you'd be doing this for the wrong reason.
>Has anyone given any thought to us using the Netscape Portable Runtime
>thingy so that we could make our importers/exporters work as plugins rather
>than having them bound directly into the executable. Never having written
>an importer or an exporter (though I'm tempted to look at a writing a
>WordPerfect one) how solid is our API and what are other people's thoughts
>on this?
A WordPerfect importer/export would be really nice. The NPR would be the
*wrong* solution to this "problem." Importers and exporters are easy to
write (I know this from lots of experience). A WP one would probably be
difficult since it's a binary format that you'd have to implement by looking
at docs from wotsit.org.
Our API is pretty solid, IMO. I mean, we have almost complete
inter-operability with RTF and MSWord document formats, which are the
"biggies" in the Office world.
Dom
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