Congratulations to our GSoC students!

I know that this is long overdue, but I'd like to congratulate and
welcome our *6* Google Summer of Code students. I'd also like to thank
all of those who submitted applications but were not accepted. We got
a lot of applications this year (32, to be exact). Paring them down to
a top 6 was not easy, but these 6 students and their proposals were
all top-notch.

I've CC'd our new recruits. I'd like to take this opportunity to
invite them to join the abiword-dev mailing list and stop bye on IRC
(irc.gnome.org/#abiword). There's really no better way to get to know
your mentors and the AbiWord community.

Without further ado, I give you this year's GSoC projects:

1. Getting rid of non-portable library use in AbiWord/Gtk+ by Robert
Staudinger (mentor: Dominic Lachowicz)
Extensive fixup of the AbiWord/Gtk+ codebase, so it can easily be
ported to platforms supported by the Gtk+ stack. The biggest chunk
will be cairo screen- and print-graphics integration.

Rob is a CS PhD student @ the University of Salzburg, Austria. Rob has
been a great asset to the AbiWord community for years, and we're
really glad to be working with him again this summer.

2. Improve LaTeX Support by Xun Sun (mentor: Marc Maurer)
This project will enable exporting (both LaTeX-native and MathML)
equations to LaTeX documents, and polish the function with tables
(with merged cells). Another aim of this project is to make AbiWord
output more beautiful and user-friendly LaTeX code, since one may need
to check and revise the converted files.

I'm a 3rd year PhD student in the Department of Electronic Engineering
of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Xun really impressed us by
submitting a nice group of LaTeX patches *before* GSoC even started.
This was our most popular proposal with 10 (!) applicants. Xun's
initiative really made him stand out above the crowd.

3. AbiWord Multiple Page View by James Denton (mentor: Martin Sevior)
Add a layout which will enable to user to view and edit two or more
pages of the same document side by side.

James is a Computer Science major finishing up my Sophomore year at
LeTourneau University in Longview, TX.

4. Rethinking Styles by Ryan Pavlik (mentor: Hubert Figuiere)
I propose to redesign styles-related interfaces (primarily the Stylist
and the Create/Modify Styles dialogs) based on a usability-tested
design and considering that styles also offer a way for users to
structure their document.

Ryan is a student enrolled at St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI,
pursuing a bachelor's (4-year) degree in computer science, math, and
Spanish. He's currently chilling in Spain doing a "study abroad"
program. He's a long-standing member of the AbiWord community and
all-around hoopy frood.

5. Improve OOXML support (import) by Ashwani Bailore (metors: Sum1 and Dom)
The objective of this project is to improve the compliance between
Abisource and Microsoft's OOXML format. A basic import filter has
already been developed. Many features of OOXML word processing
documents have not yet been implemented.

Ashwani is 20 year old student from the city of Gwalior, which is
located in Madhya Pradesh State in India. Presently she's pursuing 3rd
year of Integrated Post Graduate Program (5 year course) in Indian
Institute of Information Technology and Management with IT as her
major.

6. Proposal for developing OOXML Export plugin for AbiWord by Firat
Kiyak (mentors: Sum1 and Dom)
It will be extremely useful for many people who want to work with Word
2007 .docx files without buying any product. I propose to implement
high quality OOXML exporting plugin for AbiWord as a Google Summer of
Code 2008 project.

Firat is a first-year PhD. student at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign focusing in Computer Science department focusing on
Scientific Computing.

Again, a hearty welcome to all of our new students.

Cheers,
Dom
Received on Thu May 1 17:01:13 2008