AbiWord Weekly News (3/15/2000)

Far and away in the land of AbiWord . . .

1. Development News

Since the last edition of this newsletter, we have had 8 new patches go into the tree and we added one new contributor to the ever-growing list of names. Congratulations to Tom.

The biggest patch of this week came from Bruce Pearson, who made several significant ruler improvements. These went a long way toward ZAPPING the POW from last week.

Tom Newton added a patch to allow AbiWord to compile for GCC/GTK/X under MS Windows. This should open up even even more avenues for development (see list discussion).

Additionally, GNOME guru Joaquin Abela took advantage of his new CVS access to immediately port the Word Count dialog to GNOME and add GNOME pop-up menus. Congratulations to Joaquin.

Owen Stenseth made several improvements to his string comparison script, and Rui Silva's latest round of updates to the Portuguese translation set the bar for our other translators. 100% is pretty hard to beat.

2. On The List

This week, many diverse and significant design issues (and not a few implementation details) were discussed on the abiword-dev list, with 135 messages posted. The major issues were:

1. SVG Image support - SVG support was perhaps the most significant topic on the list this week. We discussed how to represent the images, how to store them, how to render them and a myriad of other concerns. Justin Bradford has said that he has AbiWord rendering SVG images.
2. XML support - In order to get SVG and MathML support, we need to utilize XML namespaces, which required an upgrade of the expat library. Sam TH has mostly finished this upgrade.
3. Field support - Several people, but mostly Keith Stribley have worked on this, and it looks like we are close to getting significantly better field support.
4. Ports of AbiWord - A request was made for a framebuffer version of AbiWord, and this led into a discussion of various ports, including the possibility of one to wxWindows.
5. Other compilers - Possibilities for compiling AbiWord on compilers other than Visual C++ were discussed this week, and we have already seen some progress in this area with Tom Newton's patch.
6. Translation - There was some discussion of what needs to be done in our ongoing localization effort.
7. Previewing - Some interesting issues were brought up on how to deal with previews, both for our objects and for imported (Word) objects.

3. Project of the Week

Last week, there was lots of discussion about where we were going with MS Word exporters. This week, Justin Bradford has come up with a POW to get the development process started. This POW breaks down into 3 parts, and with lots of meat on each part. So, there's plenty to go around. Once we get this working, we will be a long way to real compatibility.

4. Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 199 bugs outstanding, with 28 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 4 bugs, and 3 new bugs were opened. We continue to progress to 'zarro boogs.'

5. Other News

This week's cool patch award goes to Tom Newton for getting AbiWord to compile under Cygwin.

This week's cool post(s) award goes to Paul, for his detailed analysis of just about every issue discussed on the list. I just don't want to have to pick. Thanks Paul. :-)

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu