Subject: Re: Abiword
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Dec 14 1999 - 02:43:34 CST
At 05:19 PM 12/9/99 -0600, Stephen Hack wrote:
>We have header/footer support for the formatter, but no method in the UI to
>enter them yet.
Yep.
>> Showing non-printable characters while editing
>
>This is a feature that I personall like, but I don't know the timetable for
>this one.
I assume you're both talking about Show Paragraphs (aka Show All, aka Show
Invisibles) which optionally draws special indicators for some or all of the
following:
space,
tab,
forced line/page/column/section breaks,
paragraph breaks,
page/column boundaries or crop marks,
etc.
If so, this one really shouldn't be that bad to implement, and it's *very*
useful, so the next time I have a chance, I'll write it up as a POW.
>> Better control of sizing --
>> 100% Too Big
>> 75% Too Small
>> 90% would be about right for me
>> Couldn't this be generalized?
>
>There has been a zoom dialog written that will allow an arbitrary zooming
>factor. The toolbar doesn't accept keyboard input quite yet, but it is
>possible via the zoom dialog.
Anyone interested in writing some more widget-level code is more than
welcome to tackle this one.
>> Yes -- Tables
>
>That's a post-1.0 feature
Definitely.
>> Bullets
>
>The plan is to have lists and bullets added before version 1.0, but I don't
>know if any work has been done in it yet.
Nope. Nothing yet.
>I think the formatter supports page numbers (Paul?), but I'm not positive. I
>know that the UI doesn't support them, yet.
Yep on both counts.
>I think the plan with gnumeric was to use their code and turn it into a
>library. Then to use our cross platform UI framework to handle all of the
>graphics.
Something like that. The existing Gnumeric code is fairly UI-bound, so
refactoring the code to make it less GTK-specific will be more than a
weekend's work. ;-)
However, once the hard work of extracting XP knowledge about spreadsheets
from the codebase has been done, getting a GTK/GNOME version back up and
running using the XAP framework shouldn't be that bad. At that point,
getting ports up and running for our other platforms can happen quite rapidly.
>There is a gnome version of abiword, but I don't know the cut and paste side
>of things. I know that the Xserver's cut and paste methods work, along w/
>middle-button clicking.
AFAIK, there's been no additional gnome-specific code added for this yet.
>If you were interested, any insight/help would be appreciated. For the most
>part, every piece of "working code" submitted has been incorporated into
>abiword, even if it was not planned or supported. To examples that come to
>mind are vi keybindings (hit F12), and compressible abiword (.gabw, .abw.gz).
Exactly.
>> The work that has been done with AbiWord is impressive. I take my hat off
>> to you and the others. My expectations were raised too high a year and a
>> half ago when I entered the Linux world. I had expected that some of the
>> applications would have matured quicker. It does look like your project
has
>> been making headway even if your goals are even more ambitious (with cross
>> platform capabilities) then the Gnome applications.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> I look forward to using the efforts of your work. Just before I began
>> written this email I took a proposal doc in Word 97 with objects (33
pages).
>> I inputted it to Abi. The objects seemed to be stripped off but the doc
>> converted better than any other that I have tried.
Thanks for the kind words, John.
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Dec 14 1999 - 02:38:30 CST