I just wanted to pass along my congratulations to Caolan, Justin, Shaw, and
Jeff, who've been working together to get AbiWord switched over to use the
new libwv-based importer on all supported platforms.
This is a tremendously important milestone for the AbiWord project, because
we're finally able to take advantage of Caolan and Justin's accumulated
expertise about the various MS Word file formats with an actively maintained
importer. (The old, forked importer served it's purpose, but it was
essentially unmaintainable and definitely won't be mourned.)
As Justin mentioned, the new importer hasn't quite caught up with the
functionality of the old one yet, but now that we've got it integrated into
the tree, CVS users should be able to see all the rapid progress that's been
made over the last few weeks.
For example, all of the following should be quickly remedied:
1. Not recognizing fonts yet (Justin's working on this tonight).
2. Ditto for paragraph and line spacing.
3. Currently leaving slug characters at the end of each paragraph.
4. Speed. The importer is currently passing along each character and
properties as it's read. Buffering runs with the same properties and adding
them all at once should speed things up drastically. (The piece table can
handle this by coalescing adjacent characters with the same properties, but
it should be *much* more efficient if done in the importer.)
Paul