The road to 2.2.

From: msevior_at_physics.unimelb.edu.au
Date: Sat Mar 27 2004 - 21:50:16 EST

  • Next message: Hubert Figuiere: "Re: Commit (BOTH): don't let the WP importer handle plain text documents"

    Hi Folks,
             I thought we should talk about we need to do before the next
    stable release, 2.2.

    There are a few more must-have features IMHO.

    These are:

    1. Import Text Boxes from MS Word.
    2. Import TOCs from MS Word and RTF.
    3. Export TOCs to RTF.
    4. Import (X)HMTL to the quality we export it.
    5. Finish uniscribe complex text class.
    6. Implement a GNOME-Office feature request for external apps to easily
    find and manipulate segments on AbiWord documents.
    7. Finish the missing dialogs on Windows and OSX.
    ------------------------------------------------------
    Other nice to have features would be:

    a. Pango-based complex text graphics class.
    b. Tables in Headers/Footers (though we hear few complaints about this)
    c. Text wrapping around text boxes and images.
    d. Maths support.
    e. native SVG support.
    plus lots more....
    -------------------------------------------------
    Of course we must also fix lots of bugs with our current feature set too.

    Of the "Must Have" features I am personally confident I can do 2,3,4 and 6
    myself. I'm confident that Tomas will get his uniscribe complex text
    processing class working. I'm also confident that Hub will get OSX at
    least as good as Unix. The Windows FE needs help. If you can hekp out here
    PLEASE DO.

    After further mucking around with wv I can see that (1) "import text boxes
    from MS Word" will be really hard for me. If there is anyone out there who
    can help with this PLEASE DO.

    Regarding (4) "Import (X)HTML to he quality we export it". While I think I
    can do this eventually, I know that there are developers on this list who
    can do this better than me and certainly faster than me. So if you can
    help with this, PLEASE DO. One benchmark we need to pass is to be able to
    paste ranges of Gnumeric cells into AbiWord tables.

    I don't think all of a,b,c,d,e will get done in time for 2.2 but some of
    them are possible if new or existing developers find the time to pitch in.

    OK thats all from me. I just wanted to set some direction for us and to
    narrow our scope to get a release relatively soon. Please feel free to
    comment. I have a reasonable idea of how much time I have to devote to the
    project I don't know how much time others can devote to it. Obviously the
    release date of 2.2 pretty much depends on much work and time we put into
    AbiWord.

    Cheers

    Martin



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Mar 27 2004 - 21:50:27 EST