Subject: AbiShow (was Re: A new draw on XP refactoring)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Feb 01 2002 - 11:39:59 CST
At 12:55 AM 2/2/02 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote:
>On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, F J Franklin wrote:
>> As I mentioned on IRC yesterday, I'd like to start work on "AbiDraw" (?)
>> while I work on SVG rendering.
>
>SourceGear owns the trademark to "AbiShow" I don't know quite this means
>in the long run.
Yes, that's worth keeping in mind.
Still, if we have a criticial mass of developers interested in starting work
on a presentation graphics product once AbiWord 1.0 ships, I'm confident
that any trademark issues can be worked out.
While I'm unlikely to have time to do such development myself, I'd *love* to
help get such a group up and running. Let me know.
>> Also, I know little about GUI stuff, so if anyone feels like whipping up
>> an interface, that would make my life a lot easier :-)
>
>I've got to know powerpoint pretty well. It is pretty easy to use so as a
>starting point you could just copy how powerpoint down things.
>
>At a minimum though you need to implement floating frames. This is
>actually a lot easier in preentation graphics than a word processor and
>there is no need to flow text into and out of these things. Each floating
>frame is self contained.
Yes, these are *excellent* suggestions for getting a start on a presentation
graphics package. Couldn't have said it much better myself.
In addition, someone on the AbiShow team will need to investigate
transparency and background issues in the src/text/* component. For
AbiWord, we currently assume that we can cheaply erase the background during
editing, which isn't likely to be the case in a PG package.
>One way to do this would be to have a different piecetable per frame
>and make each slide a vector of frames.
Yep. However, some thought will need to go into how infinite undo will work
here, since that feature would need to be synchronized across multiple piece
tables (and SVG data structures). Currently, the AbiWord code delegates all
that work to a single piece table.
Paul
motto -- keep that AbiSuite torch lit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Fri Feb 01 2002 - 11:40:07 CST