Re: abiconvert project (alpha release for test only)

From: Martin Sevior (msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Mar 01 2003 - 07:46:20 EST

  • Next message: Marc Maurer: "Re: Very slow text selection in Unix builds."

    On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, Seth Delackner wrote:

    > First, a preface. This tool is obviously not needed by the developer
    > community, because abiword has the -to conversion option. However, by
    > extracting the conversion functionality I (and my employer, though come on, I
    > am speaking 100% for myself and not for them here) hope to see MsWord
    > compatibility stop being an issue for end users of any word processor
    > (including of course, our own).
    >
    > Dom said someone already stole the wv source, and that is a shame. I know all
    > this code is GPL, and when our product uses it it will by opening a shell task,
    > running the converter, and then reading the converted file. I think that is
    > pretty legitimate, no?
    >
    > here's my current source:
    > http://home.jtan.com/~seratonin/abiconvert/alpha-src.tgz
    >
    > And a built executable for Mac OS 10.2:
    > http://home.jtan.com/~seratonin/abiconvert/alpha.gz
    >
    > To run it, just type:
    > ./abiconvert infile.insuffix outfile.outsuffix
    >
    > I think it only supports import/export of RTF, Abiword, HTML, Doc. I haven't
    > figured out yet whether to just include the plugins exporters or just link them
    > in the old way. Probably the latter.
    >
    > I would have made it all just one big patch that you can apply to a copy of the
    > source tree, but since my tree only includes a small subset of all the files I
    > couldn't figure out how to make a patch that only contains the changed files.
    > diff -Naur would try to stuff all missing files into the patch).
    >

    Hi Seth,
            Just for you information I plan to considerablly improve the MS
    Word Importer (I hope) and the RTF import/exporter by the time of the 2.0
    release. Of course the import/exporters of abiword will be continuously
    tweaked forever.

    My target improvements for the MS Word import are:
    1 Headers/footers
    2. Footnotes
    3. Endnotes
    4. Various table/cell parameters.

    For RTF import/export many table/cell properties, Footnotes/endnotes.

    I hope someone else will do revision marks and hidden text.

    Cheers

    Martin

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Mar 01 2003 - 07:53:32 EST