AbiWord Weekly News (11/8/2000)
Development News
This week saw lots of tree activity, with 27 checkins from 8 different developers. Congratulations to Lauris, a new developer this week
Without question, the major commit of the week was from Martin, who finally added robust field support to AbiWord. This is a feature that has been plaguing us for a long time, and one of the last major hurdles before feature-completeness. Much gratitude is due Martin, who clearly wins the patch of the week.
In what was a big week for him, Martin also cleaned up the list code significantly, using his new field implementation. This fixed a number of serious bugs with lists, meaning that they are now enabled in non-debug builds and will be a feature in 0.7.12, when it is released.
Another significant development this week came from Dom, who added optional PSpell support. PSpell is an interface for spelling libraries developed by Kevin Atkinson. This should allow us to take advantage os significantly better spell checkers than Ispell. Dom also improved UTF8 handling in AbiWord Gnome-Print, with help from Lauris Kaplinski. Dom also fixed lots of warnings, added double-click functionality to Insert Symbol, and made several other improvements.
Vlad improved font support in CJK character set handling. Michael added dynamic zoom functionality, which is quite a neat new feature. Gilles fixed bugs 1024 and 1032. Sam spent lots of time getting things to compile, and fixed bug 1019.
On The List
This week was also an active one on the list, with 122 messages posted to abiword-dev. Significant threads this week included:
- CJK Support - A number of threads about CJK in various capacities continued this week, as Vlad worked tirelessly with various Chinese developers to fix bugs in last week's CJK mega-patch.
- PSpell Support - After Dom announced his work on PSpell support, there was some interesting discussion, much of it focused on the eventual goal of dropping support for ISpell, a truly legacy system. There was also an interesting tangent on multi-language documents.
- Release 0.7.12 - Martin proposed a release date of last monday for 0.7.12, which stimulated lots of discussion. Unfortunately, a number of significant problems were uncovered on several platforms, which prevented the release from taking off this week. However, it should hopefully be out in the near future.
- New Field Support - After Martin committed the new fields framework, Sam noticed a serious bug, about which they went back and forth for a while. Sam eventually committed a fix, which should cure a number of problems.
- LATEX Support - There was a request on the list for LATEX support for lists this week. Hopefully, list export will be added in the near future to all of our exporters.
Bugzilla Status
Currently, Bugzilla lists 252 bugs outstanding, with 46 of those still in SUBMIT state.
Other News
The AbiWord Internet Relay Chat location has moved to #abiword on irc.gnome.org. Join us there for lots of discussion, and not just about GNOME.
Sam TH
sam@uchicago.edu