AbiWord Weekly News (8/31/2000)

This issue covers the previous two weeks.

Development News

These last two weeks saw 28 patches go into the tree, from 17 different developers. In that time period, we gained one new developer. Congratulations to Peter.

The biggest improvement in the last two weeks has been the addition of the tabs dialog, originally by Stephen Hack, with later work by Aaron and Martin. Currently, there are both GNOME, Win32 and Unix front ends, with a QNX version in development.

Another major XP feature was smart quotes, which are now displayed properly, after long discussion and infrastructure work. Of course, this patch is from Bill Carpenter.

Other patches these two weeks included Word export improvements from Dom, list improvements from Martin, improved font handling from both Pierre Abbat and Peter Haight, and help improvements from Christopher Caron and Ash. BeOS also saw lots of improvement, with the addition of the status bar and context menus.

On the i18n front, the translations for Portuguese, Norwegian, Danish and Catalan were updated.

On The List

These two weeks saw 197 messages posted to abiword-dev. Significant topics of discussion included:

1. GNOME - Continuing earlier discussion, more AbiWord developers expressed interest in being a part of the GNOME Foundation, and integrating more with GNOME. There was also discussion of the impact that the adoption of StarOffice/OpenOffice by GNOME would have on AbiWord.

2. 0.7.11 - Efforts continued to get 0.7.11 out the door. Martin fixed the first bug that was causing problems, but later a Solaris issue was discovered, whih is as of yet still unresolved.

3. Smart Quotes - Bill Carpernter's latest detailed smart quote post sparked significant discussion.

4. XP Implementation - Martin asked questions about the portability of srand() and the current state of spell-checking on Win32. Both of these led to informative discussion, and to a fix for spell checking.

5. The Future of WV - wv changed maintainers this week, with Dom Lachowicz now carrying the torch. The new web page is at wvware.sourceforge.net.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 233 bugs outstanding, with 33 of those still in SUBMIT state.

Other News

SourceGear is no longer offering its Patch Prize, so your fearless editor will resume selecting the cool patch of the week.

This week's cool post is from Caolan, for demonstrating just how right ESR can be. This week's cool patch is from Bill Carpernter, for finally getting Smart Quotes implemented, and right.

Sam TH
sam@uchicago.edu