Re: GSOC 2012 - Document speeding up

Hi Chetan,

An interesting approach would be to load a large document in AbiWord
while running a profiler. Or edit a large document while running a
profiler. Then you could tell us where the slow parts are and how we
can fix them.

Thanks,
Dom

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 12:00 PM, Chetan Hosmani
<chetanhosmanigsoc@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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

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