Re: [GSOC] Speed up AbiWord for very large documents

Dear Sameera,

This is indeed a changing project that goes to the heart of the
abiword codebase. AbiWord now has a state of the art-piecetable that
enables, searches, insertions and deletions to be performed in log(N)
time. Where N is the number of words inthe document.

See:
http://msevior.livejournal.com/26736.html

and

http://www.abisource.com/wiki/AbiWordDevelopment#PieceTable_speedups

Having fixed the core of the project we're now working through the
layout classes and finding and fixing the various inefficiencies and
assumptions that slow performance for documents > 1000 pages.

Last year we had another successful AbiWord GSoC project by Ersin
Akinci who worked through a number of these bugs and fixed them. His
branch has not yet been merged into trunk because of some periphial
bugs he introduced in the process of fixing various slowness issues.

The first part of this project would be to complete Ersin's work and
get it committed to trunk. Following that would be the real challenge.
We would need to re-implement the BreakSection classes that sorts text
into lines on the screen so that it does not immediately layout all
the lines below the current insertion point every time the number of
lines changes.

I was thinking that this could be changed so that the only the lines
on screen are layed out immediately. The rest could be adjusted on a
scroll and/or as a background processes between keypresses.

Now to be frank, Ersin has privately told me that he intends to apply
for GSoC this year and that he would like to finish off this project.
He has not yet put in his application. If he does it would be very
hard for a new student to compete against his proposal since he
already understands much of the code and knows about the issues and
problems that need to be addressed.

Best regards,

Martin Sevior

 Last year we have a successful Google Summer of code project by
On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 4:39 AM, sameera kumarasingha
<sukumarasingha@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sameera Kumarasingha,
>
> Hi,
>
> I’m Sameera and now i study at the University of Peradeniya as a
> fourth semester student. I have good knowledge about c, c++ and
> windows api. GSOC will be a very good opportunity for me to improve my
> knowledge and experience, so I decided to apply for GSOC this year.
>
> I’m very interesting about the project Speed up AbiWord for very large
> documents. Even though i’m new to abiword, i’ve faced similar problems
> with some other word processing applications many times. As my
> knowledge, this might be a tough project, but i have the ability to
> complete this project successfully.
>
> For me to success with this project, i need some more guidelines,
> suggestions and i  prefer very much to discuss about this project
> further.
>
> Thank you very much,
> Sameera Kumarasingha
>
Received on Thu Mar 31 00:47:01 2011