Subject: Re: footnotes and tables (was Re: 1.0 features)
rms@greymalkin.yi.org
Date: Tue May 01 2001 - 19:41:15 CDT
On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 02:37:58PM -0700, Paul Rohr wrote:
> At 04:49 PM 4/30/01 +0100, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> >For my purposes until AW
> >supports footnotes it is not a usable wordprocessor, and for many
> >people the same goes for tables.
> Unfortunately, that kind of argument leads you down a very slippery slope.
> Everyone has their favorite feature, and we've all been trained to not pay
> attention to products which don't have the kitchen sink and two swiss army
> knives thrown in. (But wait, why use that product when mine has a third
> swiss army knife? Yeah, well *mine* has three swiss army knives *and* a
> spork!)
Paul, footnotes is a feature that is reasonable to expect it to be there by users who will check 1.0 out. It's one of those little features that will make them have an itch behind their backs mumbling: This is such a crappy wp
Although it isn't. It's great. But in a world where almost everybody uses windows besides its many weaknesses, how do you dare having the luxury of wanting a 1.0 out like that?
Most users don't care for versions numbers if it works enough for them
As soon as they need a feature that's not there, but almost every other wp has it (however badly implemented it may be) they will feel cheated.
> Most academics who use word processors need footnotes. Most word processor
> users are not academics. Footnotes are used outside academia, but not that
> often. My spouse is an academic, and I'd love to have footnotes for her,
> but I'll ship 1.0 without them.
Does thou consider Terry Pratchett an academic writer? Then you do have an interesting field of studies.
And how big a sacrifice you're making in the name of your wife... I'm touched. Let's have AbiWord 1.0 in two months, shall we?
> Tables are slightly more plausible, but in practice they tend to be very
> hard to use. (By comparison, styles are much easier to implement and use,
> but most people don't use them either.) Think about the UI choices a user
> faces when they want to create simple tabular data.
Funny, I'd think footnotes to be more frequent (and easier to implement) than tables, who could tell...
> The day we say we support tables in AbiWord, I guarantee you that someone
> *will* dig out the nastiest table layout they've ever seen in a Word
> document and try to open it in AbiWord. If we aren't pixel-perfect on that
> day, our product doesn't Just Work. Indeed, on that day, they should also
> be able to:
>
> - save it back out and view it in Word again,
> - copy it to the clipboard (in a lossless way), and perhaps even
> - cleanly import an HTML table copied from the clipboard.
> Anything less simply won't make tables users happy.
How can you not understand what 1.0 now would hurt us and give this as a motive for NOT having tables? I am confused. Is my english that bad?
> In the mean time, I'd hate to force everyone who doesn't really need tables
> to do without a rock-solid version of AbiWord.
0.8.x hasn't tables. easy huh? and 0.9.x doesn't need to have tbles as well, what they shouldn't do is show up unstable in a stable release!
ABI_OPT_TABLES=1
> PS: One of the benefits of releasing 1.0 without tables support is that
> it'll attract attention from developers who want to prove that I'm wrong,
> and that tables are much easier to implement than I think. I *love* to be
> proven wrong like that, but they will need to prove it. ;-)
Nobody said that the best implementation for tables is easy to do. Only I think that not doing any effort to try and have them, and just sitting around is not doing us any good. Now, if noone ever picks on the tables problem, untill it's the only problem with abi left out, I'd consider having a 1.0 without tables (becasue we shouldn't take an year to release a new version of abi because of only the tables feature. But it's not just the tables feature that will be blocked against an iron curtain.
I definitely have to learn c++ so I can prove you wrong, and, besides advocacy and translation, code as well.
Hugs, rms
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