Subject: Re: Text editor
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sat Dec 18 1999 - 20:52:49 CST
At 11:49 AM 12/9/99 -0800, George Harrison wrote:
>I just discovered Abiword last night. Very cool.
>
>I'm a C++ programmer and I'm potentially interested in helping out but
>right now I'm very busy at work. Maybe when this project is over...
>
>So in the meantime is there anywhere I can go to get oriented w/r/t the
>code (I tried the developer section but when I looked at the POWs I was
>still a little lost. They seem like they have a longer history)?
George,
Thanks for offering. We look forward to any help you can give.
Your best bet for getting oriented is to just dive into the source and get
your hands messy. There are READMEs at most levels of the tree which give a
basic outline of what's where. The idea with POWs is that they'll narrow
you in on the specific sections of code you'd need to touch to solve a
specific problem.
>I was thinking I'd try to get familiar with everything but using some of
>the Abiword code in this pet project of mine (a text/programmer's editor).
>I'm really impressed with your text engine and I have no idea how to write
>them myself. Can anyone out there point me to the right pieces of code to
>start looking at? Does anyone know of any references that might be helpful?
The text engine is in abi/src/text/, and is divided into two portions, the
formatter (fmt) and the piece table (pt). It's been optimized for handling
editing operations on paragraphs of formatted text, and is *quite*
inefficient for handling plain text, since it thinks each line is another
paragraph. (Try loading in a large plain text file and you'll see what I
mean.)
Once again, there's still no good substitute for just diving into the code
and seeing how it works.
Paul
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