Subject: RE: Topic: Tables and 1.0
From: Tom Newton (Tom.Newton@gtl.com)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 06:21:37 CDT
Nothing really happened and that's the problem! Well, the code _is_ still
there. But I guess I wasn't a terribly good "leader visionary" type of
person with enough people/management skills and (in particular) time to
drive things forward and attract more contributors. I've discovered that
holding down a full time job, getting married, moving house, commuting 3
hours a day etc. aren't really compatible with running a free software
project.
I'm intending to do a kind of "final" release to make it's orphanage
official (when I get time!). There have been some changes since it's last
public release including autoconf support, some new icons and a few bugfixes
and I'd like to get them out there at least.
Tom
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Sevior [mailto:msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au]
> Sent: 03 May 2001 11:06
> To: Tom Newton
> Cc: abiword-dev@abisource.com; 'Eric W. Sink'
> Subject: RE: Topic: Tables and 1.0
>
>
>
>
> 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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