Re: Porting AbiWord for Windows to Unicode

Hi,

> 1. Is it a good idea to use Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition (Visual
> C++ 2008), as I am familiar with it.

You may use whatever IDE you like. Visual Studio works fine.
Cross-compiling use mingw would probably work fine too.

> 2. What is the exact starting point, I should start working on. I
> mean, as Jordi Mas has already done some initial work, is there
> specific SVN branches which should be checked out.

Jordi's work is attached as a patch here:
http://abiword.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/2007/Apr/0031.html

However, I would discourage using Jordi's work as anything more than a
reference and a source of ideas.

We have no intention of maintaining both an "ANSI" and a "UNICODE"
build of AbiWord. Most everyone is using WinXP or newer these days, so
a UNICODE-only build should be good enough. Also, because AbiWord
depends on Glib, we only run on WinNT-derived platforms. So even if
you wanted to have support both the ANSI and UNICODE APIs, in practice
only the UNICODE parts would ever be run.

Jordi organized his code so that you could build either. Mostly, this
uses ugly macros like TCHAR and macro'd functions. I'd prefer that any
code submitted for this project use wchar_t and the "W" version of the
Win32 APIs.

Best,
Dom

-- 
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly
recognizes genius.