Re: Some user feedback

On Sun, 2010-05-16 at 20:28 +0200, Michiel Leenaars wrote:
> Hi Marc,
>
> (in English, so you are able to forward it to others if necessary)
>
> when I installed AbiWord at my parents today (on a Windows machine) I found
> that setting the default file format of AbiWord to ODF as described on the
> wiki did not work. I followed the instructions here:
>
> http://www.abisource.com/wiki/FAQ/Always_save_as_Word
>
> (ofcourse replacing .doc with .odt)
>
> Is that still the recommended way?

Yes, I just tried it in Windows, and that still works. Are you sure you
modified the Scheme with name="_custom_"? If you changed the Scheme with
name="_builtin_" then it won't work. It also won't work if you modified
the <Select name="_custom_"> block.

> If only "Automatically detect" was set as the default or when people have
> another extension they typed themselves, that would also work for him as well
> because he would just type the .odt extension by hand. Unfortunately the .abw
> format is a no go for him, as it is all about exchanging documents with other
> novice users.
>
> The last point I want to make is that my father liked the software and its
> speed, but decided not to move away from OpenOffice for now because there was
> no 'Create PDF' button. I know that people really love that feature in
> OpenOffice.org from hearing many users talk about it. AbiWord creates PDF's on
> the command line for Officeshots.org, isn't it possible to do the same with a
> button?

On Linux/Unix we create PDFs using our Cairo[1] based render engine. We
use a different (native Windows) engine in our Windows port. Since the
Windows API does not offer a way to create PDFs, our Windows port can't
output PDFs directly either.

Currently there are 2 solutions:
1. (shortterm) Use PDFCreator[2] to create PDFs on Windows.
2. (longterm) We plan to drop our Windows render engine in favor of our
Cairo based renderer. We might do that for 3.0, or we might do that
later. Someone needs to get his hands dirty and finish the render engine
port.

Cheers!
  Marc

[1] http://cairographics.org/
[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

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Received on Sun May 16 22:30:38 2010