With a total of 11,678 downloads (2032 source and 9646 binary), 0.7.0 has
been our most popular release by far.
Selected highlights since 0.7.0 include:
1. BeOS binaries! Thomas Fletcher <thomasf@qnx.com>, who has been working
single-handedly to get AbiWord ported to BeOS, took advantage of all our
packaging-related downtime recently to catch up with the other platforms.
We're thus thrilled to start releasing AbiWord binaries for BeOS R4 (on both
Intel and PPC, of course) as a full-fledged peer of the Linux, Solaris, and
Win32 versions -- which means both online and (with source and tools) on the
AbiWord Preview CD. The Be developer and user communities are known for
their high standards when it comes to end-user GUI applications, and we're
looking forward to their help in polishing AbiWord.
Be users should realize that this is only 0.7.1, and in places, more polish
is still needed. :-) In the README, Thomas has summarized many of the
relevant discrepancies between the user experience on Be and the other
platforms, so if you notice others, please make sure they get logged in
Bugzilla. Or, better yet, send patches!
2. Localization. As a special welcome to Be users, we now have a partial
French translation from Frédéric Cella <fcella@mahj.org> and Philippe
Duperron <duperron@mail.dotcom.fr>. There were also a few updates to the
Danish translation by Martin Willemoes Hansen <mwh@stampede.org>.
3. More platforms supported. Makefiles for 64-bit IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, and
OSF/1 (Digital Unix) from Philippe Defert <Philippe.Defert@cern.ch>. Like a
number of other platforms that AbiWord is known to run on, hardware
limitations prevent us from releasing and supporting binaries:
http://www.abisource.com/dl_other.phtml
4. RTF import. Peter Arnold <petera@intrinsica.co.uk> added support for a
lot of paragraph attributes, e.g. tabs, justification, margins, etc. and
fixed bugs #382 and 430.
5. RTF export. Jeff's working on improving our clipboard support these
days, and on Windows this means handling RTF. Since we didn't have an RTF
exporter yet, he's gotten that effort underway.
6. Image code cleanup. As the first step in his quest to add vector
graphics support via SVG, Matt Kimball <robozapp@xmission.com> has
generalized the graphic import code to handle more formats than just PNG.
It should now be quite straightforward to add XP importers which convert
other raster graphics formats (such as BMP, GIF, JPG, etc.) to our native
PNG format. Any volunteers for this project?
7. New package formats. In addition to the existing package formats, 0.7.1
is now also available in the following formats:
- SLP (Stampede) for Linux / Intel
- PKG (Sun Package) for Solaris
8. Miscellaneous packaging fixes. We've ironed out a variety of small
packaging glitches which crept into the (hand-built) 0.7.0 distribution,
including:
- dictionary CRLF problem in Windows setup.exe (which broke spell check)
- CRLF problems in Win32 developer tools (CD only)
- ABI_ROOT makefile problem
Because of this, we highly recommend that Windows users upgrade to the 0.7.1
binaries. Likewise, anyone building from the tarball source will need to
update the abi peer modules (expat, libpng, zlib) either via CVS or by
downloading the 0.7.1 versions of those modules.
However, now that we're building the entire CD image via Jeff's "one touch"
web-based automated build system, we should be able to reliably generate
future releases.
9. Added "make install" for Unix. The Makefiles will honor the "prefix"
environment variable, which defaults to "/usr/local". CVS users are
encouraged to use "make install" to install the AbiWord executables once
they are built.
10. Bug #425 (the fonts problem for some Red Hat 6.0 users) may have been
fixed. None of our Red Hat machines in-house ever manifested the problem,
but Shaw and Matt have each checked in changes that should help. If you're
still having trouble after upgrading to 0.7.1, be sure to let us know. We
want to be sure that this problem is nailed.
11. Various other bug fixes, including #409, 417, 420, 426, and 433. If
there's a particular bug you're especially interested in, see Bugzilla for
more details.
http://www.abisource.com/bugzilla/
If you can't find it listed there, please add it. If it's in there and it
hasn't been fixed, feel free to send mail to abiword-dev either claiming
that bug, by number, or asking for help getting it fixed.
Enjoy!
Paul
PS: I'll send a separate message in a minute when Abi tells me who the
official winner of the "guess the download" contest was.