From: msevior_at_physics.unimelb.edu.au
Date: Sat Dec 27 2003 - 17:10:00 EST
>
>> > You tell me... Does the *.abw format fullfill the transparent format
>> > requirements as set about by the FDL?
>> >
>> > If it is positive this is good news. I certainly did not know about
>> it.
>> >
>>
>> OK I Google's and found this definition of "Transparent".
> [...]
>
> Thanks. I did not mean to get you to do the work just that the whole
> thing gives me a headache although I appreciate the need for such
> legalise as software documentation is most important as well as a
> lucrative business..
>
>> OK well the AbiWord *.abw format is plain ascii XML. However our DTD is
>> woefully out of date. Not through malice,
>
> I do not think that is something anyone will ever accuse you of...
>
>> but because it has been very low
>> on our list things That Need Doing.
>
> I am not trying to change the subject or alter the flow of this list's
> work ... may I know why you are not a GNU package?
>
For many reasons which I don't want to enumerate. However one reason is
that we do not wish to assign our copyrights to the Free Software
Foundation. We have very cordial arrangements with the FSF but we don't
want to do this.
> I have already committed myself to organising the GNU docs and Abiword
> is the type of software I will like to help with decent docs.
>
>
>> That said I do know that some people inside the Free Software Foundation
>> edit *.abw forwat with Emacs to construct documents for their
>> Secretaries
>> to read (with AbiWord :-).
> Very amusing :)) and interesting
>
> Seriously, is there some form of competition between these editors?
>
Ha Ha :-) emacs vs AbiWord ? I spend more time in emacs than AbiWord and I
love the program. That said it's obvious that emacs is a great text
editor.
As you might imagine there are hard-core hackers at the FSF who are happy
to create latex and docbook documents with emacs. However, their
secretaries cannot handle the edit/compile cycle of those markup
languages. If they send their secretaries *.abw files, they can read and
alter them isntantly in AbiWord.
>> However the real reasons we use the *.abw format is because we believe
>> in
>> our own software, we want to test our software as much possible and we
>> want it to be easy for other people help out in the documentation.
> Yes. I want to help.
>
>> It's
>> far easier to use AbiWord than any other Rich Text Creation tool.
> But the honest point is with all the enthusiasm from me all I have used
> Abiword for in the past is to draft few invoices.
>
> Maybe I should take a look at Abiword's real capabilities. If it can
> i18nise properly there might be some extra goodies here.
>
Well I think our documentation HTML is very nice. Easy to read and easy to
navigate. It is based on *.abw files. We're constantly improving AbiWord
and always adding new features. However I pretty sure the threshold for
producing good documentation in European, Hewbrew, Yiddish and East Asian
Languages for AbiWord has been past.
We are extremely keen to complete our Arabic support and tackle the issues
of Indic languages but we're not there yet.
> Am I correct to assume the few Google hits on Abiword and DocBook is all
> about a planning stage?
>
No. We have docbook import and export filters but they're not very complete.
If someone is interested in improving them we'd very happily accept their
patches.
> Best wishes,
> Ramanan
>
>
>
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