Subject: Palm Doc support and feature requests
From: Garry Lancaster (glancaster@codemill.net)
Date: Tue Aug 14 2001 - 10:32:02 CDT
Hi All
Great product! I feel that with just a few more features and
bug fixes this could become the defacto Word replacement.
My company, Codemill, writes Palm software, so we are
very interested in the ability of AbiWord to read and write
the Palm Doc format.
Unfortunately, on the version I'm using at the moment
(Windows 0.9.0) there is a bug in the Palm Doc writing
code that causes some letters in the document to be
repeated. You can verify this just by saving a typical
document in Palm Doc format and reloading it from
that file later on.
I would like to be able to recommend AbiWord to
people who have bought Codemill's SuperDoc Palm
Doc reader, but this problem means that I don't feel
able to at the moment.
There is another less important issue with AbiWord's
Palm Doc support. At the moment the database name
(bytes 0 through 31 of the file) is being set to the first
32 bytes of the filename so, for example, the file
"E:\Temp\Car Insurance.pdb" ends up with the Palm
database name "E:\Temp\Car Insurance.pdb". It would
be more in keeping with standard Palm Doc naming
practices to strip the path and suffix (e.g. "Car Insurance").
Better still, make that the default but give the user the
choice of changing it just before saving.
Another usability aid would be to modify the behaviour
of the Save dialog box a bit. At the moment, if the document
I am working on is currently in Word format it might be
called "Car Insurance.doc". If I choose Save As... and
select Palm Doc format I would expect (based on the
behaviour of other programs) the file to be renamed
automatically to "Car Insurance.pdb". But AbiWord doesn't
do this at the moment - it actually saves in Palm Doc
format but with a file name of "Car Insurance.doc". This
confuses most programs that try to open it, because they
expect .doc files to be Word Doc files. This
problem is not limited to Word Doc => Palm Doc format
changes - the same problem occurs with all format
changes between formats with different file suffixes.
On a more general note, the two features I most use in
MS Word that are currently lacking in AbiWord are
tables and table of contents generation. Once these are
in, personally I would consider AbiWord "feature complete",
at least enough for a 1.0 release.
I am *very* pleased that you have not included the
grammar checker and that awful paperclip thing ;-)
Please don't take these comments too harshly. I still
think AbiWord is an impressive achievement for an open
source development and I'm sure it will continue to
improve in subsequent versions.
Kind regards
Garry Lancaster
Codemill Ltd
Visit our web site at http://www.codemill.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Aug 14 2001 - 10:36:17 CDT