GSOC 2012 - Document speeding up

Hi

I am Chetan doing my majors in Electronics at Birla Institute of
Technology, Pilani, India.

I am in my last year and have plenty of free time, and am keen on
working on this particular idea. I had this issue while working on
large documents on slow computers at college. I have a few ideas in
mind and some standard methods.

I have been able to build Abiword (along with that screenshot) and
currently going through the doxygen documentation to get an idea of
Abiword's current approach. I have a few queries and clarifications. I
might be entirely off track, please excuse me.

To my knowledge I have understood that the PieceTable is the data
structure used to represent the document. So on editing, the changes
are handled well, using a linked list. But FL_DocLayout is loaded with
content from the PieceTable.

FL_DocLayout encapsulates a logical structure and a physical space. So
the issue mentioned in the ideas page relates to the physical space
being too slow to handle a large document.

So expected deliverables from a student could be giving an
implementation to the fb_ColumnBreaker to handle document editing more
efficiently?
Also new lines might not be the only situation when such slow
reshuffling takes place. So please help me decide what should be the
scope of the project for an ideal GSOC application. Though I am
interested in using a much larger scope I am not sure it might fit the
timeline of three months.
Also I would like to debug more on what exactly goes on, so would
using a VM to simulate low resources help?

I might not be making sense at all. Please help me out. I am
interested in doing some more work on what the project might involve
before sending an application. Any help or a few pointers will be
really useful.

Thank you very much.
Chetan Hosmani
Received on Fri Mar 23 17:00:39 2012