Re: Dublin meeting

From: msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au
Date: Sat Jun 21 2003 - 08:48:43 EDT

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    > Hello guys,
    >
    > I could not make it for the Dublin meeting. I was really looking forward
    > to meet you guys, well next year.
    >
    > Can anybody post a short collection of things that have been decided /
    > discussed?
    >

    OK here is a summary of my own discussions.

    Firstly, a lot of beer was drunk :-)

    Apart from a very vocal and small minority we received great support from
    the Gnome community who hope we continue to develop AbiWord as much as
    possible.

    I had an interesting chat with a guy from the Open CMS consortium who is
    interested in using AbiWord as a CMS client. Hence the recent emails.

    I had long discussions with Jody about joint marketing AbiWord and
    Gnumeric releases. Gnumeric is likely to be ready at about the same time
    as we will designate AbiWord-2.0 sufficiently bug-free for a 2.0 release
    (early August). So we thought it would be a good idea to do a joint
    release. This is especially compelling since David Glassey is hopeful of
    making a Win32 build of Gnumeric. (Which is looking looking simply
    superb.)

    Given this we talked about certain minimum integratedness between AbiWord
    and Gnumeric. The bottom line is that we should be able to cut and paste
    while preserving formating. Gnumeric read/writes XHTML from the clipboard.
    I think our XHTML export is in good shape (albeit needing minor tweaks)
    but our import needs a fair bit of work. I don't think we import tables
    from
    XHTML yet. So that will have to be worked on. Volenteers?

    So our 2.0 release will move us significantly closer to a cross platform
    application suite.

    In addition I had long discussions with Sven Herzburg who is interested in
    using the AbiWord codebase to build a presentation program. Sven has
    worked with previous attempts to build presentation programs so he knows
    the limitations of those previous attempts. I think the plan is to put
    together quickly a package to simply display graphics one slide at a time.

    Then move into more complex animations after that.

    (I gave our presentation in AbiWord in full screen mode with pages in
    landscape mode designed to completely fill the screen, then used
    cntrl-page up/down to move between slides. It wroked very well.)

    The Open Office guys have said that they plan to pull their filters into
    libraries some time later this year. This could help us build a genuine MS
    Word exporter.

    Jody also talked about his goffice library which will contain various
    useful things for us. One of which would be Gunmeric's shading code, so we
    won't have to re-implement all MS shading patterns when we do the Borders
    and Shading feature.

    Other people at Dublin plase speak up and correct me or enhance what I
    have already said or tell us what news you have.

    Cheers

    Martin

    > Thanks,
    >
    > --
    >
    > Jordi Mas i Hernāndez - Abiword developer - http://www.abisource.com
    > jmas@softcatala.org - Softcatalā member - http://www.softcatala.org
    > - Personal Homepage
    > http://www.softcatala.org/~jmas



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