Subject: RE: Topic: Tables and 1.0
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 05:06:03 CDT
On Thu, 3 May 2001, Tom Newton wrote:
> My 2p's worth from someone who has taken part in development of a
> wordprocessor (maxwell):
>
> Listen to Eric/Paul! Tables are _really_ hard. If you take a look at
> Maxwell, which has a tables implementation of sorts, and have a look at the
> RTF import code, you can see that probably 50% of the code in Maxwell's RTF
> importer relates to importing tables. Now if you multiply that up to the
> number of importers that AbiWord support (and you'd hope that they'd all
> "Just Work" in a x.0 release), you can see there's a hell of a lot of code
> to write. And then a lot of bugs to fix. I spent maybe two months (full
> time) coding/fixing the Maxwell RTF import code related to tables. By
> comparision, the rest of RTF importing is _trivial_.
Thanks for the advice Tom!
>
> And take a look at some of the issues. We had the RTF spec in RTF format
> which was one of my table import torture tests. Pretty much the whole
> document is one big table, and maxwell performs pretty badly on this
> document. Now you could argue that Maxwell's design is wrong, which is
> probably true, but nevertheless, just the pagination issues arising from
> tables are horrible horrible.
>
We certainly want to be able to import RTF tables.
> I say (mimicking Eric and Paul): release 1.0 with a note that says "we're a
> cross platform wordpad now, come back for v2.0 (or whatever) and we will be
> a cross platform Word.
>
> We spent about 1 man year writing Maxwell from scratch, and we were aiming
> approximately for Word v2.0 (for windows). With hindsight that was too
> ambitious (although given the circumstances we did pretty well). AbiWord
> already aims higher than Maxwell in some respects (XP design, many
> importers/exporters), so celebrate what you've got with a 1.0 without
> tables.
>
Tom, what happenned to Maxwell?
Just curious.
Cheers
Martin
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