Re: long-awaited math in abiword coming?

From: Martin Sevior (msevior@seviorpc.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 05:20:19 EDT

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    On Wed, 2003-07-09 at 17:36, Luca Padovani wrote:
    > Dear AbiWord developers,
    >
    > at last I've found a student who's going to bonobo-ize gtkmathview, my
    > widget for MathML rendering/editing. Among the several advantages of
    > making a component out of the widget is the possibility of using it in
    > AbiWord for rendering math fragments. I had a discussion on this with
    > Martin a long time ago, but none of us ever had the time and resources
    > to invest on this, until now.
    >
    > I've been collecting info on bonobo in the last few days, and have to
    > say the situation is rather confusing (to me). Most of the documentation
    > seems to be out-of-date, and there's no list of gtk widgets already
    > bonobo-ized that we could take as examples of "good practice". I found
    > ggv which seems to be very well done. Apart from that, it's not clear
    > how many of the several neat features of bonobo are really
    > implemented/implementable, and how many are just cool things written in
    > an HTML page. Now, given that bonobo support has been investigated in
    > AbiWord, I was wondering if you have any suggestions on how to proceed
    > so that the development would eventually converge into something that
    > can be effectively usable. What are the bonobo interfaces we are
    > supposed to implement? What is the most valuable source of information
    > for bonobo-related things that you have studied or at least taken into
    > account?
    >
    > I will contact shortly the guys on the gnome-components m.l. with
    > similar questions, I basically wanted to let you know that something is
    > happening.
    >

    Hi Luca,
            This is very good news. After the 2.0 release I intend to make
    math support my first priority for my own development efforts.

    I have had some experience in turning GTK widgets into bonobo objects
    and it's not too hard for simple things like embedding AbiWord in
    rectangular containers.

    ggv is a good example to work from. eog is another good example. I can
    tell you where to look in the abiword source tree for how we it in
    AbiWord.

    You will need to move to gtk2 for a start. I think it would also be a
    good idea to move to using fontconfig to find fonts and xft2 to draw on
    screen.

    The issues with using bonobo to render into abiword however are a lot
    more complex than simply drawing into a rectangular area in gtk widget.
    (Which is what AbiWord-2.0 and ggv do)

    The widget would need to redraw it's according to where AbiWord put the
    widget text on a line. This can change with a single key press. Also
    AbiWord spends a lot of time erasing and redrawing text so more redraws
    there.

    Thinking about this some more, it occurred to me that we would
    probabally like much closer integration of GTKMathView with abiword than
    just using it as a bonobo component. I would actually like to map the
    gtkMathView abstract canvas to AbiWord's abstract canvas and use the
    core of the application as a library for drawing math directly in
    AbiWord.
    Then we could use AbiWord's own layout engine to tell where to split
    equations over multiple lines and line-up equations above equal signs
    etc.
    Also since AbiWord is a cross platform application and bonobo doesn't
    run on Windows, it is not a cross platform solution.

    I think that we'll discover many such issues as we work towards seemless
    integration.

    Never-the-less it is definately worth making GtkMAthView into a bonobo
    component so that Gnumeric and other office-type apps can use it too. It
    might also be a good way to get something quickly running in AbiWord
    before we've worked out how to do solve the integration issues. Even
    limited math support would be a useful addition to abi.

    OK, well as I said I'm very happy to help and the first step is
    definately a port to gtk-2.

    Cheers

    Martin
    > Yours,
    > -- luca
    >
    >



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