Subject: AbiWord 0.7.4
From: Jeff Hostetler (jeff@abisource.com)
Date: Mon Aug 02 1999 - 16:29:02 CDT
[Paul is out today, but he asked me to post this when we got 0.7.4 up
and ready for consumption. enjoy, jeff]
... is out.
Selected highlights since 0.7.3 include:
1. Snazzy new Word importer. Ever since 0.5.1, we've been using a cobbled-
together Word97 importer which worked, but was essentially unmaintainable.
We're thus thrilled to announce that AbiWord is now doing the Right Thing.
All of the old hacks and kluges have been removed in favor of a new clean,
actively-maintained importer.
Over the past month Caolan McNamara <Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie> and Justin
Bradford <justin@ukans.edu> have been collaborating on a refactoring of
Caolan's mswordview code into a new library (libwv) which not only supports
Word97, but also handles Word95 and Word6 documents as well!
We encourage everyone to upgrade to this release and see how good a job the
new wv-based importer does on your "favorite" Word documents. As you find
problems, keep logging them in Bugzilla so we can get them fixed. Or,
better yet, send patches!
2. RTF improvements. Peter Arnold <petera@intrinsica.co.uk> has added
basic support for columns and sections to the RTF importer, and collaborated
with Jeff and Bob to fix several crashes. We can now import RTF files we
exported.
3. Clipboard now honors formatting. Jeff rearchitected the clipboard
classes so that they now use the appropriate importers for each format (ie,
RTF, plain text). This means that you can cut and paste formatted text
inside AbiWord on all platforms. He then wired this into the Win32
clipboard mechanism so that this also works between apps. Justin Bradford
<justin@ukans.edu> has done the equivalent GTK work for Unix platforms.
Volunteers who understand how the native BeOS clipboard works (if it does at
all) are encouraged to submit the corresponding patches. :-)
4. Localization. The following translations have been added or updated:
Italian -- Mauro Colorio <macolori@tin.it>
Danish -- Martin Willemoes Hansen <mwh@stampede.org>
In addition, Jeff has added a fix so that it should now work to use 8-bit
characters in the strings files:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/July/0334.html
Any translator who was getting garbage characters in dialogs should read
that message and then recheck their work as of this release.
5. BeOS toolbar improvements. Thomas Fletcher <thomasf@qnx.com> has added
support for better-looking icons.
6. Bug fixes and patches from a variety of contributors, including:
font dialog (201) -- Richard Jefts <babs@cs.jhu.edu>
Unix makefile fixes -- <Philippe.Defert@cern.ch>
m68k build fix -- Roman Hodek <Roman.Hodek@informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
Win32 setup (466) -- Eric Sink <eric@sourcegear.com>
7. Unix-specific tweaks. Better error messages for Unix font problems.
File Open/Save box has fixed overwrite functionality.
NOTE FOR CVS USERS
------------------
As of this release, there is a new required peer module (wv). Be sure to
check it out along with expat and friends or you won't be able to build.
Enjoy!
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 20:57:06 CDT