Subject: Re: bug 629
From: Justin Bradford (justin@ukans.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 26 2000 - 15:50:41 CST
> I'm REALLY interested in an equation editor. I think SVD will be well
> covered when we get bonodo support going. GNOME has at least 2 SVD editors
> making good progress. I'm not so sure about the equation editor. I will
> see what I can do after "Insert Symbol" is done. Anyone else interested in
> this on this list?
Yes, I am. I'll be heading to grad school in the fall for a PhD in
biophysics, so I'm going to need this equation editor, not to mention the
ability to embed plots/graphs/figures in my AbiWord documents. It's my
goal to not use MS Office at all in grad school :)
First, I don't think things like equation editors should be "built-in" to
AbiWord. Things like this should go through a component interface.
Obviously, this component interface will have to be
cross-platform/architecture (ie. COM, Bonobo, etc). So first, we design an
adequately flexible XP interface, and then provide specific backends. Now,
one of these backends should be an AbiWord-specific shared library/plug-in
interface. This would allow us to implement some features as plugins, such
as the AbiSuite Equation Editor, and the simple AbiSuite Plot/Graph
Render, etc.
The point of the plug-in interface is two-fold:
1) we can develop standard plug-ins without having to make a new version
for each component module, and they could theoretically be completely XP
(by leveraging the existing XP framework). AbiSuite should provide some of
these basic extra tools, rather than just rely on some outside
applications available on one or more of AbiSuite target platforms.
(ie. we don't want a different equation editor on each platform [by
default] and we probably don't want to maintain a COM, Bonobo, OpenParts,
JavaBean, XML-RPC, etc version of our equation editor).
2) Not every target platform will have an adequate (if any) component
model (such as the standard unix builds). This plug-in layer (masked
by the normal component abstraction layer) will provide a similar
functionality.
Of course, if we want to write the equation editor now, this shouldn't
hold us up. Thing can always be extracted as components later.
I'm thinking that we should start by looking at Mozilla's MathML render.
As for this cross-architecture component interface, I don't think it will
be too hard, but other (far, far more experienced) people disagree.
I'm also just thinking of a document model at the moment (specifically
just embedding components into the document), and others may be thinking
of going the other way, too (embedding AbiWord in something), which is
harder.
Anyway, some thoughts on these topics. Someday, I'll get around to
actually coding this.
Justin
p.s. Who's going to LinuxWorld in NY next week?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Jan 26 2000 - 15:50:58 CST