| |
Welcome to issue 45 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
Appears we're back in sync with this issue. Hopefully we'll keep
it that way for at least one or two issues :) And appologies for any
pains this may have caused you news junkies.
Of special interest this week was Dom's addition of template
support to AbiWord. I'm sure a lot of people will find this useful.
In this issue: Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
2001.05.19 - 2001.05.25 | Who | Commits | In summary |
dom |
176 |
AbiWord template support and template dialog, memory leak
fixes, hash table changes, introduced AbiObjects (for reference
counting), field and section handling for MSWord importer, span-level
style support for HTML exporter. |
phma |
79 |
German documentation (from Ralf Müller) and French locale
changes (from Gilles Saint-Denis). |
msevior |
38 |
List export/import for RTF, hacks on style support. |
hub |
16 |
Many doxygen comments added, some Mac changes, Chinese support
in RTF importer, file extension fixes (from Andrew Dunbar), more
Applix importer improvements, RTF importer fixes (from Andrew
Dunbar). |
sam |
9 |
XHTML importer fixes and UCS-2 importer - both from Andrew
Dunbar. |
tamlin |
8 |
MSVC build system updates, bug fixes. |
thomasf |
6 |
Template dialog for QNX, fixes to printing on QNX. |
plam |
4 |
xpm2bmp converter changes. |
mpritchett |
4 |
Win32 Encoding Manager support (from Andrew Dunbar), fix for
A4 page selection problem on Windows. |
rms |
4 |
pt_PT locale updates. |
jskov |
3 |
AWN #42 release |
Patch of the week is again shared, this week between Dom and
Andrew. Dom for his template work. Andrew Dunbar, not for one
particular patch, but for appearing to be all over the place without
actually having CVS write access. Something to be fixed shortly, I'm
sure.
POW (Project Of the Week) and the new uPOW (User Project Of the
Week) is an attempt at attracting new developers and entice help
from users by lowering the bar of entry to doing something
constructive for AbiWord. A POW will describe a goal and often outline
how to get there. Presently we have a few unclaimed POWs. Please see the POW status page for more
details. Type | POW | Summary |
POW | 2001.18 | ImageMagick
multipurpose graphic importer |
uPOW | 2001.17 | Where to send
AbiWord announcements |
uPOW | 2001.9 | Determining Locale
Status |
POW | 2001.9 | Speed up bulk spell
checking |
uPOW | 2001.7 | Host for AbiWord
BugDay |
uPOW | 2001.6 | Update Feature and
UI matrices |
POW | 2001.5 | Bug-buddy support for
AbiWord |
POW | 1999.47 | Make
translated dialogs fit |
uPOW | 1999.42 | Usability Test
#1 |
uPOW | 1999.37 | CS folks
wanted... |
Here's the AbiWord bug update for the last week. If you can spare
some time, please help us triage the bugs -
you don't need to be able to program to do this.
Bug CountsThese are the bug counts for the past 4 weeks:
Date: Submitted: QA: Open:
----------------------------------------------------
2001.05.04 28 ( +21%) 49 ( -15%) 293 ( +28%)
2001.05.11 48 ( +71%) 51 ( +4%) 295 ( +0%)
2001.05.18 50 ( +4%) 58 ( +13%) 306 ( +3%)
2001.05.25 55 ( +10%) 89 ( +53%) 287 ( -6%)
Bug VotesAs a user of AbiWord, you are able to vote on bugs you'd like to
see closed. The process is quite simple: Create yourself an account if
you don't already have one. Bring up the bug
list. Click on Bug IDs to read bug details. If you find an interesting bug you'd like to have fixed, cast
your vote by clicking on the "Vote for this bug" link on the
bug description page. You have 30 voting points you can cast in whatever
proportions you'd like on anything between 1 and 30 bugs. But
note that developers will likely prioritize a bug with 30 single
votes than a bug with a single 30-unit vote. So vote with lower
unit counts (5 or so) to make your voice heard!
From the sorted
list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be: ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
1030 | 123 | 0.9.0 |
Font substitution table
|
1410 | 31 | future |
Please add .doc Save As file type in future releases
|
1182 | 27 | 0.9.0 |
Cursor Disappears
|
1276 | 26 | future |
Handle tables
|
1408 | 23 | 0.9.0 |
Automatic spellcheck splits words on accented characters (and specials, other languages, non ASCII symbols)
|
1445 | 15 | 0.9.0 |
Documents saved as .abw are sometimes flagged as bogus document
|
1381 | 10 | 0.9.0 |
I want an install fonts option
|
1046 | 10 | 0.9.0 |
Some localized strings truncated in Windows version
|
1056 | 10 | Future |
Redraw performance is dog slow. Sometimes unacceptably slow.
|
1333 | 10 | Future |
Inserting a word is O(n) in the number of words in the document
|
Target MilestonesWe have just started nominating bugs for the next two big
releases. You (as a user or developer) can have your say on which bugs
to nominate by casting your vote on bugs as described above. The
current milestone distribution is as follows:
Traffic on the developer
mailing list has been increasing again this week. People getting
tired of preparing for their exams, by any chance? :) This week,
interesting topics included:
- doxygenation:
Hubert asked if the doxygen documentation is updated automatically on
the web site from the sources, which Sam answered yes to - after which
Hubert quickly added a lot of comments and a small overview for the
importers. If you've not seen the doxygen comments before, you should
definitely have a look.
- New modules in CVS:
Sam made it a bit easier to access the sources in functional lumps as
required for the various platforms by adding CVS modules.
- standalone import/export:
Stuart D. Gathman asked for the wide variety of AbiWord importers and
exporters to be made available in standalone form. But as Sam pointed
out, they actually work with the AbiWord backend as an intermediate
representation, so it's not really possible (or at least easy) to make
those available in smaller packages. In any event, it's already
possible to use AbiWord to convert between formats in batch mode, so
except for the memory overhead, the functionality is available.
- Feature request:
Brad posted a request for simple numerical calculation in fields. It
apparently gave Martin a rather large itch, and he eagerly promised to
make the work. The thread got rather long though (by AbiWord dev list
standards anyway), since quite a few people didn't feel the feature
was suited for a word processor. So here's one of those situations
where the wish for a lean and mean word processor conflicts with the
features hackers may want to add because it's fun. Fortunately, we now
have a plugin architecture, so I'm sure a compromise will be worked
out in the end. We'll see.
- Patch: Fix for Bug 1164, 2nd try:
Talking about long threads, this one wins the price of the
week. Appears that there was a lot of corner cases to sort out when
dealing with RTF import, so Andrew Dunbar ended up revising his patch
a great many times with feedback from Vlad, Dom, Hubert and Ha
Shao. All worked out in the end though.
- german translation finished:
Ralf Müller completed his major feat, translating all of the help
files to German. Awesome!
- I'm back - sort of:
Your fearless editor returns to the land of the living after having
had his appendix removed. Cannot be advised to do just for fun. This
probably makes it clear that having just a single editor for AbiWord
Weekly News is a bad idea - we should have two, like the newly reborn
GNOME summaries. If you'd like to help, please let me know (and please
don't volunteer if you're a developer! :)
- Applix import!:
Hubert "officially" announced his Applix importer as it now imports
raw text. Good stuff!
- Me and my Purify:
As has happened a few times before in the past, Mike went on the hunt
for memory problems. We still need fixes for (some of) the leaks he
found. Incidenly, this started a small thread on the availability of
free tools to track down leaks. Seems we're still waiting for the
support to go gold in GCC - I seem to remember to hear about a
Purify-killer feature for GCC more than a year ago. We'll see.
|