AbiWord Weekly News (5/3/2000)

Can't buy me love . . .

AbiWord 0.7.9 Released

This week was a big one for Abi the Ant and his favorite word processor. After almost three months of development, we finally released 0.7.9, the latest edition of AbiWord. With improvements ranging from Insert Symbol to command line conversion to ports to everything from Mac to IRIX, we have moved significantly closer to 1.0. Bob and Eric have provided all the gory details here.

Patch Prize

This week features a new element of this column - the weekly Patch Prize. As regular readers know, I always pick a "cool patch" for the week. But the staff at SourceGear decided to take this a lot of steps further, and will now be picking a lucky contributor each week to give $299.99 to. So rev up those compilers and get going.

As a special, one time only, way to kick of the weekly Patch Prizes, the folks at SourceGear decided to give TWO prizes this week. Both of these people have contributed significantly this week to our progress towards 1.0.

The first goes to Chris Caron, for his very extensive help system. And just to demonstrate how international a project this truly is, it is all in French.

The second goes to Martin Sevior, who ported the Insert Field dialog to Unix. Having everything work on all the platforms is one of AbiWord's strengths, and Martin has done a lot to keep that going.

Congratulations!

Development News

This week saw 10 new patches merged into the tree. We also had one new contributor, the now-rich Chris Caron. Congratulations Chris.

The biggest patch this week came from Chris Caron, who added an entire French language help system. AbiWord won't Just Work for everyone, every time, and when it doesn't, a quality help system is vital. Translation efforts are currently underway.

The other large patch this week is from Martin Sevior, who ported the Insert Field dialog to Unix platforms, keeping up cross-platform parity. While the changing fields implementation will likely cause this to change, it is important to keep all the platforms on the level.

Other patches included a fix for Insert Symbol on QNX so that it works on Photon from Thomas Fletcher, and updated translations for Danish and German.

On The List

This week didn't see much traffic on abiword-dev, but what did get sent had lots of import. Important topics among the 69 posted messages included:

1. Fonts on UNIX - Stefan Rieken posted lots of interesting ideas for improving AbiWord's font handling, and font handling in general under X Windows. This generated significant discussion. Additionally, a few more specific XFree86 font problems were brought up.

2. User Documentation - This important topic was discussed some, and plans for translation of the excellent system created by Chris Caron were made.

3. Field Bugs - Sam brought up a few bugs with fields, but they may not be fixed until after the new field implementation.

4. RTF Bugs - Bug 536 was discussed, and will hopefully soon be fixed.

Project of the Week

After a hiatus, the Project of the Week is back. This week, Eric asks people to fix page positioning on Windows. Currently, What You See is not necessarily What You Get. Hopefully, this can be remedied soon.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 201 bugs outstanding, with 20 of those still in SUBMIT state. Last week, we closed 5 bugs, 2 of which were fixes, and 7 new bugs were opened. At this rate, AbiWord will never get done. :-)

Other News

This week's cool post award goes to Bob and Eric for their excellent description of everything we have accomplished with 0.7.9.

As I mentioned above, I will no longer be awarding a patch of the week.

April Wrap-Up

April was far from the cruelest month for AbiWord. This month

- We released AbiWord Version 0.7.9. This was a significant upgrade, with lots of development behind it.

- There was lots of traffic on the list. The most prolific author was Sam, with 60 messages.

- There was lots of development, with 70 new patches in the tree.

Sam TH
sytobinh@uchicago.edu