AbiWord Changelog

From AbiWiki

Current revision as of 21:37, 16 February 2011

AbiWord 2.8 Releases (taken from an Archive site)

AbiWord v2.8.6 Changelog

13-Jun-2010

Core

• Preserve character properties when typing. This fixes a bad regression that was introduced in 2.8.5. (Martin Sevior)

Development

• Maintain and release 2.8.6. (Marc Maurer)

AbiWord v2.8.5 Changelog

30-May-2010

Core

Editing/Layout

• Fix paste of rich text from HTML and ODT, where previously some formatting properties were not closed properly. (Martin Sevior)
• Add a number of robustness fixes to the layout engine. (Martin Sevior)
• Fix a table selection bug. (Sander Bogaert)

Import/Export

OpenDocument

• Fix 10330: Ignored top and bottom margins. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix a typo in the bottom margin code import code, resulting in a bug similar to 10330, but then on import. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 11905: Document with columns not correctly exported. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 11937: Incorrect page margin defaults. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 11874: Bullets, border and 'first page' style not rendered right. Adds the Unicode MINUS SIGN to the list of unicode chars that renders as a dashed list. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 10884: Columns (section?) margins not preserved on opendocument import. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 11887: Footer text placement / alignment problems. The real problem was that we didn't support different headers/footers on facing pages. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 11862: Table of Contents not properly exported. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 11848: table:number-columns-repeated and table:number-rows-repeated not supported. (Marc Maurer, Martin Sevior)

Office OpenXML

• Fix wrong page margins on export, similar to bug 11937. (Marc Maurer)

Plugins

Collaboration

• Fix 12744: Crash when more than 2 people are collaborating and one of the clients disconnects. (Marc Maurer, Sam Rooney)
• Don't include document names that a buddy does not have access to in the list of available shared documents that is sent to him. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix some small memory leaks in the *.abicollab importer. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 12728: AbiWord should honor SRV DNS records when collaborating over XMPP. (Damien Diederen)

MS Write

• Fixed several bugs, added character conversion support and support for page properties. (Ingo Brueckl)

Internationalization

• Update Galician (gl) translation. (Miguel Bouzada)
• Updated Romanian (ro_RO) translation. (Lucian Constantin)
• Updated Danish (da_DK) translation. (Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér)
• Update German (de-DE) translation. (Volker Ribbert)
• Updated Slovenian (sl-SI) translation. (Martin Srebotnjak)

Development

• Maintain and release 2.8.5 (Marc Maurer)
• Fix 12701: configure --disable-collab-backend-{tcp,service} should not check for asio.hpp. (Thorsten Vollmer)
• Replace '==' tests in configure by '='. (Jean Bréfort)
• Remove all uses of fp_PageSize::MarginXXX, since getting the document margins this way is wrong/broken. (Marc Maurer)
• Remove some useless asserts and add some useful ones. (Martin Sevior)

AbiWord v2.8.4 Changelog

15-Apr-2010

Core

Editing/Layout (All platforms)

• Fix a bug where deleting a character in non-Western scripts caused a random number of characters to be deleted. (Martin Sevior)

Editing/Layout (Linux / Mac OSX)

• Bug 6987: "Thai string can't be deleted in proper sequence". This fix applies to all non-Western scripts, for example Russian and Arabic scripts were affected too. This also fixes the cursor movement for complex scripts, as text cluster boundaries are now always honored. (Marc Maurer)
• Bug 11785: Abiword shows strange symbols instead of Arabic characters. This fix applies to all languages that activate our font substitution mechanism. (Marc Maurer)
• Fix the text rendering of complex scripts when text is selected. (Marc Maurer)

Plugins

GNOME Office

• Use double click to select a component type and close the dialog. (Jean Bréfort)

Development

• Maintain and release 2.8.4 (Marc Maurer)
• Link the OpenDocument plugin explicitly against zlib, which fixes the autoconf MinGW build. (Fridrich Strba)

AbiWord v2.8.3 Changelog

03-Apr-2010

Core

• Bug 12670: abiword uses libxml2 API badly, leads to crashes (Michal Schmidt, Red Hat).

Import/Export

AbiWord

• Bug 12658: Meta data is escaped twice in the AbiWord exporter. (sum1)

OpenDocument

• Bug 12608: Crash during OpenDocument import. (sum1)
• Make OpenOffice.org 3.2.0-rc4 happy and not claim we write out invalid documents. This is clearly a bug in OOo. Consider this part of your AbiWord Customer Service plan. (johanbr)
• Bug 9913: Abiword won't open password protected ODT files. (Marc Maurer)
• Bug 11858: Tab stops not imported. (Marc Maurer)
• Bug 11942: Tabstops (and tab leaders) not exported. (Marc Maurer)
• Add application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-web as a supported mimetype in the ODF importer. Also add application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-{template,web} to abiword.desktop. (Marc Maurer)
• Bug 12667: default-tab-interval not exported. (Marc Maurer)
• Bug 12153: Add AbiWord's version and platform in the meta:generator field. (Marc Maurer)

Office Open XML

• Bug 12624: Smart quotes are discarded during docx export. (sum1)

Plugins

GNOME Office

• Fix a GValue initialization. (Jean Bréfort)

Interface

Mac OSX

• Bug 12617: Include files needed for Mac OS X build in source tarball (Obin Hickory).

Development

• Maintain and release 2.8.3 (Marc Maurer)
• Disable debug messages in the OOXML validation code until it is completed. (sum1)
• Fix a warning. (sum1)

AbiWord v2.8.2 Released

12-Feb-2010

AbiWord v2.8.1 Released

29-Oct-2009

AbiWord v2.8.0 Released!

26-Oct-2009

AbiWord v2.8.0 is the latest release of the multi-platform word processor that combines state-of-the-art usability, powerful features, and excellent interoperability. This release contains a number of exciting new features in addition to hundreds of bug fixes.

Improved Collaboration support

AbiWord's collaborative capabilities are greatly improved in this release. For example, it gained the ability to distinguish the text written by different authors using various text highlight colors while collaborating. Figure 1 shows a document being edited by three different authors at the same time. The collaboration support has been tightly integrated with the new online web service called http://abicollab.net/, which lets you store documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly.

Annotation / Comment support

AbiWord 2.8.0 gained support for annotations, or "comments". You can annotate any piece of text with a remark that will show up when you hover over it with your mouse. A list of all remarks will be displayed in the footer area on every page if desired.

Smart Quote support

Proper Smart Quote support has been added in this latest release. While older AbiWord releases claimed to have it on board (there was a preference to enable Smart Quotes), it was never (properly) implemented.

Multi-Page View

Also new in 2.8.0 is the ability to view multiple pages side by side. This is convenient for users who have large widescreen monitors, or for quickly getting an overview of the document. Figure 4 shows various pages of a document shown side by side.

True Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support

The GTK port of AbiWord has gained proper SVG support in the 2.8.0 release. While previous AbiWord releases had the ability to import SVG images, their quality was low. This has been fixed, and SVG images will now look better on screen and in print.

It's worth noting that importing WMF images from Microsoft Word documents will also result in high quality images now, as they too won't be rasterised anymore.

Improved OpenDocument Format (.odt) support

The AbiWord development team considers support for the Open Document Format (ODF) important for a number of reasons, including long term durability and our interoperability with other products on the market. These days many governments, companies and individual users are moving to ODF. Thanks to an ongoing grant from NLnet Foundation, AbiWord is on its way to become one the best ODF implementations on the word processor market. This release incorporates many improvements to the ODF import/export filters, such as documents with page anchored images and frames that are now properly imported, as well as documents with a relative width to columns and tables. Coupled with a large number of other improvements makes that AbiWord's support for ODF is better than ever.

Improved Office Open XML (.docx) support

As with OpenDocument Format support, we consider interoperability with the Office Open XML (.docx) format popularized by Microsoft Word to be very important. The Office Open XML import filter in AbiWord 2.8 has seen great improvements as the result of funding through the Google Summer of Code program. The import filter now supports all common complex document features such as lists, tables, headers, footers and images.

New printing framework

The printing system in the GTK port of AbiWord has been completely rewritten. The most notable change is the support for GTK Print in favor of the deprecated gnome-print. Furthermore the quality of the Postscript and PDF output has been increased significantly, which was made possible by porting our rendering code to use cairo.

... and more changes all over the map!

• Many improvements to the document import and export filters, most notably the OpenDocument (.odt), Office Open XML (.docx), Rich Text Format (.rtf) and LaTeX (.{{TEX|tex]]) filters.
• A new S5 exporter has been added.
• The GNOME Office Chart plugin has been updated to be able to embed entire Gnumeric spreadsheet documents (GTK version only). This requires Gnumeric 1.9.x to work.

Note to Developers and Distributors

Some specific changes might be of interest to software developers and distributors:

• For people scripting AbiWord to print from the command line, a change in the command line options was made. A typical way to print a file directly from the command line would now be:

  abiword --to=ps --to-name=fd://1 file.abw | lpr

• A totally revamped build system has been put in place, making it more standards compliant and allowing cross-compilation of the Windows version on Linux/Unix systems. The plugins are included in the abiword source tarball now as well.
• The GTK port had its rendering code ported to use cairo for all its output (the Windows and OS X ports will follow later).
• Make the Mac OSX port compile again (we won't consider it a supported port until we move it to the new cairo-based renderer).
• Removed a ton of deprecated GTK functions.
• Make the code compile almost completely warning free.
• Move from Glade to GTK Builder to construct our dialogs in the GTK port.
• For people embedding AbiWord using the provided GTK AbiWidget, the Web view was reworked to make text flow in a way to use all available space allocated to the widget. This in contrast to view modes such as the "Print Preview" and "Normal" mode, which are more paper-oriented.
• For people packaging PyAbiWord, make sure to compile libabiword using the --enable-dynamic flag, otherwise plugins will fail to load.