Yep. As Justin and Caolan keep mentioning, the Word formats are big and
messy, so we can always use more coding and debugging help in tackling these
problems.
One of the great things about Open Source projects is that a lot of work can
happen in parallel, if enough people are interested in helping out.
Remember how the Linux community achieved such great hardware compatibility?
Lots of people all over the world divided up that problem by each doing
their share to produce a huge number of drivers and other code.
We fully expect that, over time, the AbiWord community will prove the same
thing for file format compatibility. Like drivers for Linux, importers and
exporters for any document or image format you want are isolated behind
well-defined APIs, so that new contributors are free to step up at any time
and start in on yet another piece of the puzzle.
In short, having flawless export to various Word flavors is definitely very
important for AbiWord, but I'd much rather have the existing folks focus on
doing a great job on importing first.
HOW YOU CAN HELP
----------------
For those of you who don't feel like you've got the time or expertise to
help out on the coding front, here are two ways you can help improve our
file format support:
- help Bob isolate reproduceable bugs in the existing code
- keep evangelizing AbiWord so we can find *other* people to code
Otherwise, it's time to start putting that compiler to use! :-)
Currently, the core team is committed to maintaining the AbiWord importer
and exporter, and the PNG importer. Here's the status of other formats,
AFAIK:
- Caolan and Justin own the Word importer (with help from Shaw as needed),
- Peter Arnold owns the RTF importer, and
- Jeff started the RTF exporter, which needs an owner.
The following document formats are still up for grabs:
- Word export
- WordPerfect import and export
- (are there any others which get used a lot?)
Likewise, we could use importers which use XP code to convert any of the
following raster image formats to PNG:
- JPEG
- GIF
- BMP
- (name your favorite raster image format)
Finally, Matt Kimball has been doing a lot of groundwork to allow SVG to
become the native vector graphics format for AbiWord (like PNG is for raster
images). Once he gets that work checked in, we're likely to need converters
for other common vector graphics formats, especially:
- WMF
Paul