Bummer! Thanks for pointing out a nasty oversight on our part. The libpng
and zlib code is now in tarball form on our download site.
Linux users, note that you don't really need to download our versions of
this. The code has not changed at all from the current releases of
libpng and zlib which are available elsewhere. The only change we've made
is the inclusion of a Makefile which automatically puts the libs in
abi/dist so that the Win32 build of AbiWord can find them.
To build this stuff, make sure that libpng and zlib are peers of the abi
tree. For example, I use the following layout:
~/src/abi
~/src/libpng
~/src/zlib
Then:
cd ~/src/zlib
make
cd ~/src/libpng
make
cd ~/src/abi
make
Actually, I think Jeff recently checked in changes to abi/Makefile which
automatically build zlib and libpng if you need them, but I'm not sure
those changes are in a recent tarball.
> Anyway, now that I've de-lurked, I'm interesting in helping in doing the RTF
> importer/exporter. I've done one before for CorelXara - has anyone else
> used that application? Probably not, otherwise I'd still be there 8-)
RTF? Cool. Our importers and exporters are in abi/src/wp/impexp. You should
almost certainly start by cloning one for another format and adapting for
RTF. The architecture might end up being similar to what we've done for
our AbiWord document reader. AbiWord documents are XML-based, and we use
the expat XML parser.
(BTW, we're eventually going to get around to moving expat out of the abi
tree. Our goal is that the abi tree should contain only code which is
maintained by the abi project. Therefore, expat doesn't belong, because
it works so well that never have to touch it, whereas our hacked up version
of ispell *does* belong.)
Our goal for the RTF importer is that we should be able to read/write files
which are compatible with MS Word. Specifically, on Windows platforms,
we need to be able to copy some formatted text from MS Word and paste it
into AbiWord without problems. The architecture of our importers and
exporters was designed to be able to accomodate either of two scenarios:
- read/write an entire document from a file (the usual case)
- read/write a partial document from memory (for use with
system clipboard operations)
If you run into trouble, let us know by email here on the list.
Thanks for de-lurking! :-)
-- Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman eric@abisource.com