Subject: Re: The 1.0 Jobs List ( :-)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Jun 16 2000 - 11:25:12 CDT
Sam,
Thanks for kicking off this discussion. You've chosen a different set of
features than I would, but that's fine. I'm sure we all have our pet list
of features. :-)
At 12:14 AM 6/16/00 -0500, sam th wrote:
>1) Page Numbering
>This is, IMHO, the most importnt thing missing in abiword. Page numbers
>are just a trivial combination of fields and footers. Fields currently
>work well for page numbers, and footers work properly in in the formatter.
>However, there is no way to insert footers other than text file hacking,
>which != Just Work. Before we got to 0.9.0, this needs to be added.
If someone's interested in doing the XP GUI work to add support for editable
headers and footers, that'd be wonderful. I doubt that it can be done
properly in a weekend hack, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
If I had more time, I'd be tempted to write this up as a POW, but for now I
should really stay focused on ...
>3) Fields
>This is obviously important to having a worthwhile release, and since it
>will involve a file format change, it needs to happen pre 1.0.
Absolutely.
>However,
>it is currently in good, hands, so I wouldn't worry.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Sam. :-)
You should probably worry at least a *little* bit, because I've been working
too slowly recently and those twins won't wait forever. If I don't make
serious headway in the next week or so, remind me to start asking for more
help.
>4) Tabs dialog
>On the abiword-dev IRC channel (which everyone should check out) aaron
>said that he was potentially interested in working on shack's old patch
>for this. However, it isn't really high priority for 1.0
Actually, I was quite encouraged to see this happening. While AbiWord can
certainly be used without a Tabs dialog -- that's why we did all the hard
ruler work first -- it's a fairly glaring lack for any modern word
processor.
Heck, even WordPad has a Tabs dialog.
>2) 757/764
>These are Word import bugs, having to do with Word's "smart" quotes. This
>affects lots of documents, and would therefore be nice to fix.
Unicode has smart quote characters, but we may have to do some font-mapping
at rendering time to get them to display properly on some platforms.
Indeed, there's a high degree of overlap between the implementation
requirements for this feature and the next one...
>3) All the non-latin-1 charset bugs
>There are too many of these to count. A good implementation of this might
>fix lots of them. Then again, this is an area in which I have no clue, so
>I'll be quiet now.
Definitely. A quick look on your favorite usenet archive, such as Deja,
suggests that there's a *lot* of interest in AbiWord from speakers of
various non-Latin-1 languages. (This is only a guess, since those posts
look like gibberish to me.)
As for implementations, Henrik got off to an excellent start with using
iconv for some of the necessary conversions to and from our internal Unicode
representation. However, for obvious reasons he hasn't messed with the
Unix-specific code for handling font charsets and input methods.
Further work in this area would have great payoffs, so anyone interested in
continuing this work should definitely speak up.
>1) Word export
>Thanks to Jaime, this is now in the cards, but probably not before 1.0.
>Round trip is good, right Paul?
Yes, round trip is good. However, I'd agree that we should definitely not
expect this to arrive for 1.0.
As Sam mentioned, we can take a lot of pride in our Word import capability.
People are continually impressed with how well this feature Just Works.
However, to get to this point took many years of hard work on the part of
Caolan and the wv community. That quality is the hard-earned result of
endless hours of reverse engineering, testing, bug fixes, etc. (For
example, the wv credits files list several dozen people, which doesn't even
count all the numerous folks who've sent Caolan busted documents to examine.)
I'd love to blow everyone's socks off by releasing an equally-impressive
Word exporter, but it's just not fair to expect such a messy, critical
feature to Just Work equally well in a much shorter timeframe.
Having said that, there's no reason to stop anyone from working on code
which will eventually lead to a Word exporter. I'm just suggesting that we
not expect the feature in a major release until we've given it some time to
mature.
For example, I could easily imagine turning that code on for the first time
in the 1.1 or 1.3 branches of the CVS trees. That way people who want to
start playing with it *know* that the feature needs to be beaten on, and 1.0
users can get the predictable rock-solid stability they expect.
>2) Normal mode
>Aaron has expressed interest in working on this, which I find to be a
>nicer mode to work in on other word processors.
See the old thread on this topic for my concerns about making this feature
Just Work.
Getting a first approximation is easy -- you basically undo the work we did
to make Page View pretty from around December 98. However, getting a real
Normal View is a lot more work, and probably requires a more substantial
refactoring of the View classes. Feel free to investigate this feature, but
I'd be quite happy to release 1.0 without it.
Paul
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