Subject: Re: AbiWord Lite (#2488)
From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Dec 31 2001 - 02:50:38 CST
--- Bryce Nesbitt <bryce@obviously.com> wrote: >
Piotr Banski wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, 30 Dec 2001, Alan Horkan wrote:
> > > Abiword is already small and light, and it may
> get
> > > lighter as a lot of the newer features seem to
> living in plugin space, and
> > > some stuff is being seperated out.
> >
> > This looks like a convincing argument to me, in
> that if most functionality
> > goes into plugins, 'AbiLite' may simply be AbiWord
> sans plugins. And the
> > marketing possibilities I was excited about would
> still exist: it could be
> > stated explicitly that without plugins, Abi is
> like an extended *editor*,
> > and it gains *word processing* capabilities when
> you add plugins. Cool.
> >
> > There is still this 'if' to be considered, but I
> recall that this is
> > pretty much the direction in which Abi is going,
> isn't it.
> >
> > Thanks for the feedback,
> >
> > Piotr, getting ready to rest his case
>
> A programmers editor needs some features that Abi
> does not have, mostly
> relating to fixed width fonts & tabs. Set incoming
> tab width (e.g. 4),
> set logical tab width (e.g. 3) set outgoing tab
> width (e.g. use spaces).
I would personally *love* these features. Even Word
does not do tabs properly for fixed-width fonts.
If these kind of steps are taken towards making Abi
a general editor I would personally be very keen to
add more programmer's plugins such as syntax (lexical)
highlighting.
> An email editor needs a few features also, mostly
> relating to quoting
> of existing text (e.g. "paste as quotation") and
> plain text
> ("save as HTML & plain text", "warn about not plain
> text").
This should also be almost trivial as a plugin. At
least by adding a toolbar button to do the quoting.
We could even use the "human readable text" export
for email text.
> A proposal for AbiLite would shape itself easiest by
> defining the target
> audiences. It might not end up all that "lite".
I'm not worried until somebody demands an ASCII-only
version in the expectation it will simplify things.
Andrew Dunbar.
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com
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