Subject: AbiWord 0.7.8
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Feb 02 2000 - 03:37:29 CST
... is out.
Although many members of the AbiWord community will be at LinuxWorld in New
York this week, the development team won't have an official presence at this
show. (Sorry -- no booth, no Abi, no T-Shirts.) To make up for this, we've
pulled together a sweet release for you that's chock full of goodies.
Those of you who like to download the sources and build it yourself will
need to grab an extra library, libiconv. Updated build instructions can be
found, as always, at:
http://www.abisource.com/dev_build.phtml
Selected highlights since 0.7.7 include:
1. True WYSIWYG. Previously, we had subtle reformatting discrepancies when
changing resolutions (such as printing and zooming). Bruce Pearson
<BruceP@wn.com.au> has done the dirty work to take care of that, provided
that scalable fonts are available. Thus, on Win32 only TrueType fonts are
selected when creating fonts. Fixes #319, 362, 374, 524, 552.
2. No more character dirt. Bruce also nuked the infamous bug #7, which has
perplexed and annoyed folks for well over a year now. Not any more. :-)
3. Overline support. You may not use this feature, but physicists like
Martin Sevior <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au> can't live without it.
:-) While he was in there, he also added support for variable width
under/over/strike lines, so they'd look appropriate at various scale
factors. Fixes #234.
4. Minor display glitches. Bruce and Henrik collaborated to fix a bunch of
problems, including #375, 583, 588, and 714.
5. Insert Date and Time. A mighty handy dialog, courtesy of Alexey Sinutin
<megabyte@salesexplosion.com>.
6. Page-level navigation. Added keybindings for Ctrl-PageUp/PageDown (move
to top of previous/next page) and Alt-Ctrl-PageUp/PageDown (move to
beginning/end of this page).
7. Better support for non-English content. While the AbiWord interface has
been translated to over a dozen languages already, the actual content
handling was far too English-centric. For this release, Henrik Berg
<henrik@lansen.se> has been focusing on expanding our support for 8-bit
languages. Among other things, he's gotten ispell dictionaries fully
working for those character sets, by means of Bruno Haible's libiconv
library. In addition, he's turned on Win32 keyboard support for 8-bit
character sets. Fixes #556.
8. Translations. New translations for Indonesian -- a tag team effort by
Tim & Rita Allen <tim@proximity.com.au> with help from I Made Wiryana
<made@nakula.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de> -- plus Swedish, courtesy of Henrik Berg
<henrik@lansen.se>. In addition, the following translations have been
updated:
Danish Birger Langkjer <birger.langkjer@image.dk>
Finnish Jarmo Karvonen <karvonen@dawn.joensuu.fi>
French
Italian Marco Innocenti <dot0037@iperbole.bologna.it>
Norwegian Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas@online.no>
Spanish
Also, based a suggestion from Henrik, there's now code to allow us to try to
fall back to a 'default' translation for a particular language before
falling-back to EnUS.
9. LaTeX exporter. Created by Joaquin Cuenca Abela <cuenca@ie2.u-psud.fr>.
10. Word importer. Justin and Caolan have fixed things so that tabstops,
breaks, unicode conversion, page break before, widow/orphan control are all
imported successfully now. Fixes #630-632, 634, 684.
11. RTF importer. Now handles negative values for margin-left and
text-indent, courtesy of Malcolm Peacock <malcolm@mpeacock.demon.co.uk>.
Fixes the following POW:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/November/0074.html
12. Minor file format change. To make it easier to properly recognize
AbiWord documents, we moved the <abiword> tag up to the top of the file,
preceded by the appropriate XML declaration. This should not break
compatibility for anyone, and will automatically be fixed the next time you
save your AbiWord files. If you encounter any problems with this,
definitely let us know.
13. Error propagation. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <sytobinh@uchicago.edu> rewired
a bunch of file-handling logic to propagate useful error messages out to the
user. Fixes #343, 563, 626, 665, 682, and 683. He also squashed a bunch of
compiler warnings. What a guy!
14. Windows stuff. Bruce Pearson <BruceP@wn.com.au> turned on mouse wheel
support (#655, 696). Henrik Berg <henrik@lansen.se> added logic to
automatically detect and default to the appropriate language and ruler
units. This feature can be overridden by the system.profile or in a user's
preferences. He also added the old-style Windows shift/ctrl-ins/del
keybindings for cut, copy, and paste.
15. Unix stuff. By popular request, libstdc++ is no longer required. (We
never really needed it anyhow.) PostScript emissions now use signed
characters, as suggested by Bob Monaghan <bob@sbst.com>. With the latest
fonts.dir, Symbol fonts should print properly now, too. Finally, Birger
Langkjer <birger.langkjer@image.dk> provided a bunch of RPM fixes for GNOME
desktop integration (#699).
16. BeOS stuff. There were no significant BeOS-specific changes in this
release, although most of the new cross-platform (XP) features should Just
Work. If you'd like to help keep the BeOS port completely up to date,
contact us via abiword-dev@abisource.com.
17. Other platforms. Avid watchers of the AbiWord sources will note that
there's been progress made on MacOS and QNX/Photon ports. However, there's
no ETA on binaries yet. Please don't send us mail saying you want them. We
know that. Instead, send us help, money, etc.
Enjoy!
Paul
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