From AbiWiki

Revision as of 20:44, 26 February 2008

Google Summer of Code 2008 is now being planned. Like every year Google sponsor student to work on Free Software. AbiWord plan to participate in the program.

The opening for organizations to apply is March 3 2008.

Here you should find all the information.

Project Ideas

This is a list of project ideas with the name of a potential mentor. Use this as an base for your proposal, but if you have an idea that is not in this list, feel free to propose it.

Speed up Table Performance

Proposed by: Martin Sevior

AbiWord's current Table layout algorithm was borrowed from Gtk. While this has proved to be very robust and comfortuably handles merged cells and nested tables, it gets slow for very large tables (noticeable with over 100 rows). This project would be to improve AbiWord's table performance so that it at least matches that of Firefox.

Improve ODF support

Proposed by: Martin Sevior

AbiWord now has very good compliance with the ODF format but it can be improved. This project would be to improve this so that a wide range of documents can be exported from AbiWord, imported to Open Office then exported back into AbiWord from Open Office with no data loss.

Improve Latex Export

Proposed by: Martin Sevior

AbiWord has an export to Latex plugin that performs basic export but does not current support many features of AbiWord, including tables, lists, footnotes, endnotes or maths. The project would be to steadily improve Latex export.

Cairo rendering

Proposed by: Hubert Figuiere

AbiWord really would benefit from using Cairo for its rendering. This project involve the following:

• remove any overt dependencies on X11
• implement Cairo rendering in the cross-platform side using pango for font management.
• implement the printing using GtkPrint on Unix

Revamp the style dialog

Proposed by: Hubert Figuiere

The style dialog is currently awkward to use. It needs rework. This project would involve the following tasks:

• redesign the UI
• reimplement the UI in a cross platform way with at least a working front end. This might involve scratching a bit the UI abstraction layer to minimize the front end work.

Some possible ideas proposed by Robert Staudinger:

http://www.abisource.org/~robsta/mockups/abiword-styles-simple.png

http://www.abisource.org/~robsta/mockups/abiword-styles-full.png

Redesign the templates

Proposed by: Hubert Figuiere

Using and editing the AbiWord templates is very awkward. The idea is to redesign it to be user more friendly

Enhance Win32 build system support

Proposed by: Jordi Mas

Currently Abiword for Win32 can only be built on Linux. The proposal is to extend the current build support to enable building Abiword for Win32 using a Windows system. Additionally, to add support for been able to build Abiword using Microsoft C compiler (available gratis in the Visual Studio 2008 Express), that has a very good support for debugging applications in Win32.

Port Abiword for Windows to Unicode

Proposed by: Jordi Mas

As many of you already know Abiword in Win32 is an ANSI application. The idea is to port it to the Unicode API, which has the following benefits:

• Support on Windows for the many new "Unicode only" languages such as Hindi, Georgian, Nepali,Armenian, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani. We already have Abiword translated to Napali that is only a Unicode language and that currently does not work. And more will come.
• Improving international and multilingual support:
  • Better integration with the features of the NT platform
  • Better support of the Multilingual UI (MUI) features of Windows 2000/XP/Vista

I have done some preliminary work that I never had the time to complete. The project should resume from there.

Implement Print Preview in Windows

Proposed by: Jordi Mas

Currently Print Preview is not implemented in Windows. This is a very common and useful function of any word processor.

Search bar

Proposed by: Jordi Mas

The idea is to have a search bar, like the Firefox one, at the bottom of Abiword that replaces the current search and replace dialog boxes. You could access to more advanced functionality using an Advance button that brings you to the advance functionality.

There was some discussion of this a few years back and most of the people seemed excited about the idea. This requires implementing the logic and the GTK and Win32 implementations.

Implement document preview in Nautilus

Proposed by: Jordi Mas

Implement document preview in Nautilus. This will be a step forward in our integration with GNOME and also very useful to our GNOME users.

DAL: AFAIK, we already have a document preview Bonobo control. IMHO, this is more of a 2-day hack then a GSoC project. Besides, who uses Nautilus previews these days?

Application process

TBD