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AbiWord Weekly News #65, (2001, week 41, released 2001.10.16)
Welcome to issue 65 of the AbiWord Weekly News.
BiDi mode now has all the necessary major features to be really useful. And there's been other nice bug and feature fixes this week. There's also some nice stuff going on that's not driven by programmers, which is nice to see - I wish for more of that.
In this issue:
Editor(s) of this issue: Jesper Skov
CVS Stats
| 2001.10.06 - 2001.10.12 | ||
| Who | Commits | In summary |
| dom | 61 | Unix printing fixes, --to and --print option fixes, makefile tweaks, remove autosave files on normal exit, string fixes, t602 and WP importer work, and Catalan strings (from Jesus Corrius). |
| tomas_f | 35 | BiDi and justification/tab-related fixes. |
| msevior | 26 | UI tweaks for lists, backend support for odd/even/first/last footers, and fix cursor size problems. |
| mpritchett | 21 | NSIS update, and changed default open dialog to support all formats. |
| phma | 14 | German locale updates, Bokmal update (from Karl Trygve Kalleberg), Catalan updates (from Jesus Corrius), and French updates (from Gilles Saint-Denis). |
| matti | 13 | MSVC6 build fixes, list numbering fix, RTF list import fixes, and RTF header/footer export. |
| fjfranklin | 7 | vw updates. |
| hub | 5 | Configure fix and OSX module fix. |
| jskov | 5 | AWN |
| rms | 2 | Updated IT and PT strings. |
| dchart | 1 | 0.9.5 changelog |
| cuenca | 1 | Perl bindings portability tweak |
| plam | 1 | Multikey conversion fix (from Yong Li) |
Project Of the Week
POW (Project Of the Week) and the new uPOW (User Project Of the Week) is an attempt at attracting new developers and entice help from users by lowering the bar of entry to doing something constructive for AbiWord. A POW will describe a goal and often outline how to get there.
Presently we have a few unclaimed POWs. Please see the POW status page for more details.
| Type | POW | Summary |
| POW | 2001.22 | Sorting contents of combo boxes, and splash screen preference option |
| POW | 2001.18 | ImageMagick multipurpose graphic importer |
| uPOW | 2001.17 | Where to send AbiWord announcements |
| uPOW | 2001.09 | Determining Locale Status |
| uPOW | 2001.07 | Host for AbiWord BugDay |
| uPOW | 2001.06 | Update Feature and UI matrices |
| POW | 2001.05 | Bug-buddy support for AbiWord |
| POW | 1999.47 | Make translated dialogs fit |
| uPOW | 1999.37 | CS folks wanted... |
Bug Update
Here's the AbiWord bug update for the last week. If you can spare some time, please help us triage the bugs - you don't need to be able to program to do this.
Bug Counts
These are the bug counts for the past 4 weeks:
Date: Submitted: QA: Open: ---------------------------------------------------- 2001.09.21 134 ( +5%) 189 ( +10%) 346 ( +0%) 2001.09.28 143 ( +6%) 169 ( -10%) 345 ( +0%) 2001.10.05 145 ( +1%) 170 ( +0%) 352 ( +2%) 2001.10.12 153 ( +5%) 178 ( +4%) 363 ( +3%)
Bug Votes
As a user of AbiWord, you are able to vote on bugs you'd like to see closed. The process is quite simple:
Create yourself an account if you don't already have one.
Bring up the bug list.
Click on Bug IDs to read bug details.
If you find an interesting bug you'd like to have fixed, cast your vote by clicking on the "Vote for this bug" link on the bug description page.
You have 30 voting points you can cast in whatever proportions you'd like on anything between 1 and 30 bugs. But note that developers will likely prioritize a bug with 30 single votes than a bug with a single 30-unit vote. So vote with lower unit counts (5 or so) to make your voice heard!
From the sorted list of votes, we found the current Top 10 Bugs to be:
| ID | Votes | Milestone | Summary |
| 1276 | Table support | ||
| 1410 | Please add .doc Microsoft Word Save As file type in future releases | ||
| 1030 | Font substitution table | ||
| 1016 | PDF output would be nice | ||
| 376 | File assosciate problems for all file types with Win32Slurp | ||
| 1360 | custom pagesizes can't be entered | ||
| 1747 | background colour of text selection is always grey | ||
| 1406 | xhtml documents fail to open: "Bogus html document" msg | ||
| 1104 | AbiWord crashes when trying to load a particular MS Word file | ||
| 1545 | Help only works for localizations en-US es-ES fr-FR |
Target Milestones
We have just started nominating bugs for the next two big releases. You, developer and user, can have your say on which bugs to nominate by casting your vote on bugs as described above. The current milestone distribution is as follows:
| Milestone | Bug count |
| Without Nomination | 290 |
| 0.9.x | 41 |
| 1.0 | 91 |
| future | 83 |
Closed Bugs
Note that there are many many bugs just waiting for QA before they can be closed. Please help!
In the past week, the following 2 bugs have been closed (i.e., closed and verified):
On the Mailing List
Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled on about 200 postings per week.
You may also find interesting threads on the user and documentation lists (unfortunately the archive for the latter is broken at the moment).
This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:
BIDI status: Tomas Frydrych announced the last missing (major) BiDi feature to be fixed, and called for BiDi builds to be made for the next release. Dom followed up, pointing out that BiDi should probably become the default build at some time - assuming it doesn't have a (noticable) performance penalty.
International Spell files available for Windows: Martin announced that Micheal Pritchet has made ispell dictionaries available for Windows. This complements the RPMs available for Linux.
multiple inheritance: Francis James Franklin asked if it was still not allowed to do multiple inheritance. I think the consensus was that it's now OK to do, assuming it's for a good cause. Someone should update the coding guidelines!
Fruits of the [Grocery Store]: Tim Schmidt keeps working on the idea of a giveaway/cheap CD with AbiWord. This posting contains a suggested layout specification for the CD.
Rolling out AbiWord - a non developer's perspective: David Lechnyr made a few nice observations on rolling out AbiWord to users. We'd appreciate more information like this - and request for enhancements filed as bugs in BugZilla.
Bugs that are Bad: Sam posted a list of known Bad(tm) bugs, i.e., bugs that cause crash and/or data loss.
Re: Autosave: This thread was started on the user list, resulting in Dom fixing the code. AbiWord now deletes backup files when the document proper is saved.