1. Anonymous CVS access. Instructions are available at
http://www.abisource.com/dev_download.phtml
2. "AbiSpec", a searchable database of planned AbiWord features. This is
an expanded version of the feature roadmap. Available at
http://www.abisource.com/abispec
3. A new tarball and zip file containing the complete source tree.
Overall, the state of the tree is as follows:
1. Editing data structures have been updated to use Piece Tables.
2. Unlimited Undo and Redo have been implemented.
3. The abi/src/wp subtree has been reorged for better modularity.
4. Although the default GUI is still platform native, we have sample
implementations of wxWindows GUIs for Linux and Windows. We are hoping to
use wxWindows for the GUI going forward, and so far it looks very
promising. Thanks to Joseph Bronkema for initially suggesting wxWin. In
fact, if anyone has any positive or negative experiences, or pitfalls that
would be good to be aware of, let us know (we are using wxWin 2.0 Alpha).
5. We've mapped out the architecture for importing/exporting different file
formats -- starting with the AbiWord XML format and the *very* *early*
*beginnings* of MSWord97 (which will crash on the most trivial documents).
If you are interested in seeing how import/export works, look at the
AbiWord example, since the Word importer will be largely rewritten in the
next few weeks. By the next drop we should be ready to think about
starting other formats.
6. The build is not as stable as we'd like, primarily because of a certain
class of bugs related to document structures (non characters such as
paragraph, column, section breaks etc). Currently these do not have
"width" like a character does, which ends up causing problems with
insertion points around these boundaries, inserting and deleting across
paragraph boundaries, etc. We have an approach to fix this, but didn't
want to implement it this week while trying to get CVS going. Look for a
new tarball next week with much more
stable editing. More details about the problem and the class of bugs that
it exposes will be forthcoming in a subsequent email.
Next Highest Priority Items (in no particular order)
1. Start on GUI spec
2. Add ability to comment on features in AbiSpec
3. Resolve decision on wxWindows vs native GUIs
4. Importers/Exporters
5. Clipboard Support
6. Printing
Any and all comments are welcomed and encouraged.
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The AbiWord Development Team