Selected highlights since 0.7.1 include:
1. BeOS improvements. In response to all the demand for BeOS binaries,
Thomas Fletcher <thomasf@qnx.com> has been zooming through the Be version,
turning on much-requested features such as:
- spell check
- drawing optimizations to speed up selections
- MIME support so files are double-clickable in the Tracker
He's also been working on printing, but doesn't have a printer to test on,
so YMMV. Be folks with access to printers are encouraged to help test this
feature. Help from Be folks with printers who know how to use their
compilers would be especially welcome. ;-)
2. Localization. The following translations have all been updated:
French -- Philippe Duperron <duperron@mail.dotcom.fr>
German -- Christian Terboven <cterboven@gmx.net>
Finnish -- Jarmo Karvonen <jarmo@dawn.joensuu.fi>
3. More platforms supported. AbiWord now builds and runs on Windows NT for
the Alpha platform, thanks to Alan Young <ayoung@teleport.com>.
4. Suffixes. When saving files, we now automatically add suffixes where
needed so that it can be reopened using the appropriate format.
5. Spell check dictionaries. One of the so-called "features" of ispell is
that its (binary) dictionaries can be built in numerous incompatible
platform-specific ways. Our goal for this project is to have a single,
portable dictionary format which can be used on all platforms. Thus, over
the past few months, Darren Benham has been heroically modifying our copy of
the ispell code to allow people to use the "wrong" dictionaries (ie, not one
hand-built for their platform).
For this release, we've temporarily backtracked and are releasing two
platform-appropriate variants of the dictionary file -- one big-endian and
the other little-endian. We'd eventually like a better fix, but for now it
should Just Work.
6. Bug fixes and patches from a variety of contributors, including:
cursor navigation, selections (6, 451) -- Richard Jefts <babs@cs.jhu.edu>
insertion point motion -- Matt Kimball <robozapp@xmission.com>
FreeBSD 3.2 build glitches -- Ming-I Hsieh <mihs@wm28.csie.ncu.edu.tw>
wrapper scripts (490) -- stephen@networks.com
7. Unix-specific tweaks. The More Windows dialog scrolls when needed. The
geometry command-line option works, too.
Enjoy!
Paul
PS: One final note from the "Coming Soon" department. Dedicated Bonsai
watchers will note that Caolan McNamara <Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie> and Justin
Bradford <justin@ukans.edu> are collaborating on a refactoring of Caolan's
mswordview code into a new library (libwv) which will replace the existing
unwieldy Word97 importer. That work is going on in a new CVS module in our
tree, but it's not (quite) yet usable in AbiWord.
This is great news, and we'll keep you posted as things progress.