Subject: Re: On the Road to version 1.0
From: Dom Lachowicz (doml@appligent.com)
Date: Tue Dec 18 2001 - 14:30:27 CST
> As for feature freeze, I'm not so sure. Have people sat down and worked through
> user scenarios? Can AbiWord write a book?
Actually, yes, I know of people doing this.
> Work as a low cost word replacement?
About 500,000 to 1 million people already do this
> * .svg import (which does nothing but mess up documents for me)
Going to be disabled before the release. The ImageMagick plugin handles
SVGs so this isn't a huge problem.
> * Smart quotes on Linux (the checkbox has no useful effect)
Pushed to 1.2 already by me. Smart quotes are disabled by default now,
and they really do work on linux but are buggy with regard to undo
operations (1822) and spell-checking.
> * Autotext
Good enough for what it does. Does it not insert text for you? If you'd
like it to do more, file a bug in bugzilla with a RFE tag.
> * Styles (which are still a bit unpredictable)
100% predictable here. There's only like 1 style-related bug in bugzilla
besides making a "better" way to define a style from a selection. The
bug has to do with applying a style to a list. If you find bugs related
to styles, file them in bugzilla, just don't say that they're
unpredictable on the mailinglist.
> * Bookmarks (which are, as far as I can tell, are invisible after insertion)
Bookmarks are just tags to a specific place in a document
(placeholders). You then make a hyperlink that goes to a bookmark. In
HTML, this'd look like:
<a name="bookmark1" />
text....
<a href="#bookmark1">Take me to bookmark 1 please!</a>
> * Execute script (which just says ATTN: for me)
Install perl or some other scripting language and this dialog will go
away. Write a scripting plugin and this dialog goes away. No scripting
engine is installed.
> Do import/export filters work correctly for character sets across platforms?
> Is an AbiWord document really portable? Because of issues like smart quotes, I think
> the answer is currently "not quite".
Again, smart quotes are disabled by default. In my experience, AbiWord
documents are 100% portable across platforms unless you build against
the unsupported libxml2 parser. If you find evidence to the contrary,
file bugs in bugzilla. The import and export filters do in fact work
correctly for character sets across platforms. The TXT and RTF filter
were worked on extensively by Andrew Dunbar. All of the XML filters were
worked on by Vlad Harchev and others to make sure that they worked in
CJK and ISO-8859-2 locales. If you find evidence to the contrary, file
bugs in bugzilla.
> Is image insertion really ready? The lack of .gif and .eps import are hard to take.
> The inability to resize an image, or flow text around it, is a real downside.
Image insertion is ready. GIF and EPS can be inserted via an ImageMagick
plugin that we plan on distributing with 1.0. Flowing text around images
is post 1.0 (1.2 in fact) and resizing images is a work *almost*
completed by myself that will make it into 1.0 under my "polish existing
work" clause.
Dom
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