Subject: AbiWord 0.5.3
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Apr 08 1999 - 15:45:46 CDT
... is out.
It's been almost three weeks since our last release, and now that we've
moved into our new digs, it's time to focus on cranking towards those lovely
0.7.0 binaries. Not that we've been slackers in the mean time, mind you, as
the following list of selected highlights attests:
1. GUI polishing. It's Spring now in the northern hemisphere, a season
when many people tend to transform eggshells into all sorts of unnatural
colors. So, Jeff and Shaw have been spiffing up the GUI to match in a
variety of ways, including:
1a. Color, beautiful color. For folks who get bored by plain-vanilla
GUIs, try out our enhanced theme (GTK) and color scheme (Win32)
support. Can you say no more gray? :-)
1b. Status bar. Almost entirely XP code. Of course.
1c. Shaw improved the following GTK dialogs:
- FileOpenSaveAs (file types, directory awareness, etc.)
- Font (encoding)
1d. Some GTK menu work. (I don't remember what, but it's better.)
2. Styles. Basic paragraph- and character-level styles support, plus a few
builtin styles. See wp/samples/Styles.abw for more details. To finish the
feature, we still need a few dialogs to edit user-defined styles.
3. Headers and footers. Eric's added a whole bunch of code to get these to
start working. See wp/samples/footer.abw for more details, and look for
more in the next release.
4. Fields. Simple support for time, page_number, and page_count calculated
fields. Folks looking for an easy project to get started on could easily
add a lot more fields here.
5. Slurp. Jeff added all the nasty DDE code required to make .abw files
double-clickable from the Win32 desktop, etc. Folks who care about why this
file association feature is called "slurp" rather than "leech" should feel
free to read the code, or send private mail to Jeff. All the rest of us
care about is that it Just Works.
6. VI keybindings. After seeing the emacs keybinding support in 0.5.2,
Robert G. Werner <rwerner@lx1.microbsys.com> accepted the challenge laid
down and added rudimentary VI keybindings. Both VI and emacs fans are
encouraged to flesh out their respective keybinding sets, but only if they
*promise* not to engage in any taunting flamefests on this list.
7. BeOS port. Thomas Fletcher <thomasf@qnx.com> has now gotten through the
diff-merge from hell, and has started integrating all his BeOS-specific work
into the CVS trees. He's made a ton of headway already, but wants everyone
to know that this effort is not considered "finished" to his standards.
Thus, if you're interested in helping with the code, have at it. If you
just want to see it run, wait a bit.
8. Word8 importer. Justin Bradford <justin@ukans.edu> has checked in the
baseline framework for a new, clean importer to replace what we're currently
using. This code is currently *not* part of the build process, but it *is*
in CVS, so others can take a look and offer support and encouragement.
9. More XAP framework improvements. Among other things, Jeff moved the
default location for preferences files. Also a bunch of miscellaneous
janitorial work to clean up the division between XAP and WP code. As of
now, any remaining AbiWord-specific logic in the XAP framework code is a
bug, and should be logged as such.
10. As always, various bug fixes. See Bugzilla or Bonsai for more info.
ONE FINAL NOTE: Anyone who's got renegade changes which aren't currently
checked into CVS are *strongly* encouraged to tidy them up and submit them
ASAP. We're just about ready to do our pre-0.7 reorg of portions of the
source trees, and you'd probably rather have us do the diff-merge so you
don't have to. ;-)
Enjoy!
Paul
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