need dev hints

Ove Kaaven (ovek@arcticnet.no)
Mon, 21 Jun 1999 17:35:08 +0200 (CEST)


Hi guys, I'm trying out AbiWord. I am a seasoned programmer, but recently
I kind of got the inspiration and felt like writing some science fiction
(found that was also a good way to kill time while waiting for a long
compile). So I went looking for a word processor for Linux, and while I
could just install Corel WordPerfect, I was curious how far the open
source word processors had come. Found AbiWord on the Debian package list,
so I decided to try it...

Now I run the CVS version (not much CVS activity lately, eh?), but there
are some things I'm wondering whether would be easy to fix, and if I were
to try, where in the code I should look... (the dir structure looks a bit
confusing, for example, I'd like to not start by researching that)

First, maybe a backup option could be added, so when a file is saved and
the file already exists, the previous version is renamed to something that
ends with ~ or something, just in case. Where would I do that?

And then there's that annoying bug (found it as #431, but both font and
size is affected) where if I use a font (Helvetic), start a new paragraph,
backspace it, the font is reverted to Times New Roman. Urgh. Any ideas
how I should fix that, or where to look?

(And by the way, if I make it use the Norwegian ispell dictionary, why
aren't the Norwegian 8-bit (iso-8859-1) characters handled right? Well,
*I* can live without, since my own brain's spellchecker happens to be
even better than what a machine could provide, but it's a minus in
abiword's show-off value when I want to show my colleagues what you can
do with linux...)



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