Re: filters: Abiword vs KWord

From: William Lachance (wlach@interlog.com)
Date: Mon Mar 18 2002 - 00:24:24 EST

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    On Sunday 17 March 2002 18:10, you wrote:

    > (3) Now WRT WordPerfect import filter. In KWord's WP filter, I have
    > compiled few lists to map almost all WP international character to its
    > Unicode equivalent. Obviously, this could be used in Abiword as well. In
    > addition, with Abi's WP filter framework, also it should be easy to
    > support WP version 5.x.

    Hi there, I sent you some e-mail in the fall regarding potential
    collaboration on WP filters for KWord vs. AbiWord. Sorry I haven't followed
    up on that-- I've just been rather terribly busy with school (it's my final
    year of university) so I haven't had enough time to do much more than send
    off a few trivial patches to the current AbiWord filter. J.M.M, another
    AbiWord contributor, has done some slightly more substantial stuff over the
    past little while (he just added apparently-quite-decent column support last
    week)

    I have been thinking about the issues involved though, and have a list of
    non-trivial tasks in my head that are blocking the filter from being
    feature-complete:

    1 - image support (dependant on hooking up an importer for the WPG format--
    imagemagick has one, but doesn't seem to import bitmaps correctly. [ this
    might be easy to fix ] dia apparently also has a wpg export filter, which
    might form a good basis for an input filter, but I haven't really played with
    it)
    2 - table support [ dependant on abiword supporting this feature, but
    shouldn't be terribly difficult once it does ]
    3 - footnote/endnote support [ dependant on abiword supporting this feature,
    but shouldn't be terribly difficult once it does ]
    4 - font change support [ seemingly dependant on getting a list of fonts from
    abiword, and a font substitution table. i imagine this will be coming post
    1.0, but this hasn't been much discussed on this last. ]
    5 - list support [ i pretty much managed to reverse engineer the abiword list
    format, but haven't found time to implement the damn thing. as i'll probably
    be rather busy for the next month at least, if anyone is feeling keen in the
    interim, they may go ahead and implement this without fear of duplicating
    effort. i have attached my findings from a while ago to the end of this
    message ]

    If you have any thoughts on this, I'd love to hear about them.

    Is the WP 5.x format a strict subset of the WP 6+ format? Or were there been
    more substantial changes? It looks from your code as if there are only minor
    differences, so much so that one might be able to subclass off a WP 5.x
    filter from a WP 6+ one (this would be the abi way of doing things).

    Good to see you on the list, in any event-- it seems to me as if more
    extensive collaboration between KWord and AbiWord can only be a good thing,
    especially on issues such as this.

    Regards,

    Will Lachance
    wlach@interlog.com

    -- 
    need some primer on inserting lists into AbiWord for WP import
    Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 23:58:59 -0500
    From: William Lachance <wlach@interlog.com>
     To: abiword-dev@abisource.com
    Reply to: wlach@interlog.com
    

    Hi. I think I've reverse engineered how wordperfect does lists, but I need some idea of how exactly to insert lists into AbiWord. Here's what I've gathered, in case it might be helpful:

    -Find a wordperfect byte group with D30E (outline define) - this starts the list - The for each element we have this structure: bytegroup DD04 - Para style begin on (pt. 1) bytegroup  DD05 - Para style begin off (pt. 1) bytegroup DD06 - Para style begin on (pt. 2) bytegroup D432 - Para number on <then whatever you want to use as a bullet is as normal for a wordperfect doc.> bytegroup D433 - Para number off bytegroup E0 (tab) bytegroup DD07 - Para style begin off (pt. 2) <then whatever you want to put as list data is as normal for a wordperfect doc.> bytegroup DD08 - Para style end on <then eol group DD04 (may be optional?)> bytegroup DD09 Para style end off

    Then repeat this structure for every element in the list.



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