Re: What I need to be able to switch to Abi-word.

Justin Bradford (justin@ukans.edu)
Fri, 25 Jun 1999 19:47:10 -0500 (CDT)


> Isn't this a word processor issue because of the need to support
> diff marking in the formatted output(s) ?
>
> I do agree that in a Un*x world we should be using rcs or cvs
> for the document control facility. What would be nice would
> be a way to render a diff marked document from any pair of
> versions.

How would you encode the revision information in the documentation,
though? I imagine most Abiword users wouldn't be happy if they had to send
a CVS status file along with their Abiword doc.

Besides, revision in an XML file is really very simple. Basically, it's
just a matter of adding an author section at the end with some unique id,
and then adding a revision tag which species insert/delete, user id, and a
timestamp. It'll increase the file size quite a bit, but I imagine they'll
want to begin gzipping the files (like Gnumeric does) eventually, anyway.

Once there's a plug-in interface, it might be possible to have a module
act basically as a CVS client to build revision information for Abiword on
the fly.

OR, we could just append all changes to the document as diffs each time
it's saved, but since that would bloat the document so badly, we could use
obscure binary structures in place of those XML tags. Oh wait. That's the
Word format...

Justin



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