AbiWord Weekly News #107, (2002, week 35, released 2002.09.05 for the week ending 2002.09.02)

Welcome to issue 107 of the AbiWord Weekly News.

In this issue:

• Discussion
• Development
• Bug Update
• Latest Releases
• Special Interest

Editor(s) of this issue: E. A. Zen

Discussions

Traffic on the developer mailing list has settled at about 200-400 postings per week.

This week, interesting topics on the developer list included:

1. commit: Merge Cells :  Martin entices us with his new modeless dialogue for MergeCells.   Alan begs for more toys!

2. print preview screenshot :  Alan, still drooling, pours on the extra slobber when pointing out Marc's "Yet Another Big Secret Project; Don't Tell Zen!"   This is same secret project mentioned last week, but now, a big debate is sparked over the best way to utilize it.

3. cvs graph, mozilla, infamy :  Alan finds an interesting project for "graphing CVS", and if you've got an idea how I could utilize it in conjunction with the AWN, feel free to drop me a line.   Then, he points out someone's anti-abi whine at Mozilla (WHO PUTS WHINES IN COMMENTS ANYHOW!?)*.   Dom points out many such things are going away with XFT and FontConfig.

4. AbiWord Font Usability question :  Dom asks for suggestions from our Human Interface Guidelines friends in reference to the font preview and combo boxes. They never bothered to submit their suggestions to the list, and we ended up arguing over our favourite ideas (READ: small holy war).

5. Version of the future? :  I asked what you wanted to know...when's 1.0.3 coming out.   Dom nudged, hinted (in his never-all-that-sublte way) for one this week.   Stable maintainer Hub says, "Soon," and Mark emailed me, "But not too soon."   With the sites recent instability, you may want to dampen your expectations a couple more weeks ;-)

6. Commit (HEAD): Remove background transparency (bug 3888) :  Simply stated by Marc, "remove the transparency option from the background color dialog."   Simply stated by us, "Ho No You Didn't!"   Panic sets in as the Nederlandse explained in more carefully selected Engrish, "I removed the *alpha level* slider, since we don't support alpha levels for the background color."

7. why RTF (not ABW) is our primary clipboard format :  This started in August and continues into September.   This is a very interesting point and important to anyone interested in application development.   Basically put, "Using RTF as a clipboard base allows for the function to be useful on most office and operating system platforms."

Development

Name:  Convert Aiksaurus to GTK+2
Description:  Step by step move old Aiksaurus to GTK+2 for HEAD (2.0...some day)
Advertisement:  It would be really good of you to be good and do a good porting of this good plugin so I would have good words for good instead of just good; I hope you understand that good.
Recommended Outline:
1)  Update aiksaurus's configure checks for GTK2.   AbiWord's configure scripts and ac-helpers have this code already, so hopefully it's a cut&paste job.   We have some auto* gurus and helpful folks on IRC if you need help.
2)  Update aiksaurus's GTK+ dialog to use GTK+2 widgets and functions.   This will probably not be too difficult, but I will shut my mouth lest I use it to shoot myself in the foot.   Mostly, this should be:
    a) Use g_signal_connect instead of gtk_signal_connect
    b) Use a GtkDialog instead of a GtkWindow
3)  If necessary, update AbiWord's plugin (abiword-plugins/tools/aiksaurus) to work with any changes made in #2.
Comments:  If you want, you can email dom for help, or even better - stop by on IRC so we can work in real-time: irc.gnome.org#abiword
System:  Linux (GTK+2)
Challenge level:  **... 2 stars out of 5

Name:  Style and/or Diction Plugins (bug 3281) (do either/or or both!)
Description:  build a plugin to allow Abiword to check style and diction
Advertisement:  me got no grammer fixer, help mes can't you?
Recommended Outline:  Create a plugin for AbiWord that allows the checking of style and diction.  The source code for the gnu style and diction tools is available here: http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
      As a prototype you might be able to hack something using the AbiCmd plugin to wrap the style and diction tools.  The AikSaurus (Thesaurus) plugin should also be a helpful guide.
      When you get the basics working you could try to get Abiword to display green squiggle underlines to mark errors, or otherwise work on a good user interface.
Comments:  A great way to start playing with the AbiSource
System:  Any OS will be fine.
Challenge level:  ***.. 3 stars out of 5

Name:  Fix Windows printing boogs (bug 3239)
Description:  build a plugin to allow Abiword to check style and diction
Advertisement:  ????????????????????????????? (no, that's really the ad!)
Recommended Outline:  You must become magical to know how to fix this.
Comments:  "The problem is that printing on Windows is broken with several brand of printer drivers (see dependent bugs). It appears that with standard PostScript driver it does not happen. It appears also that version 0.9.6 had less problems than 1.0.1 so we might find out where the regression is bu diffing.
    "Please, be sure to read all the bug reports. Even partial fix are accepted.
    "Fixes must be done against STABLE tree and possibly ported to HEAD (the later can be done as a second step)."
      This comes from Hub
Notice:  This may already have been fixed with the libiconv upgrade, stay tuned!
System:  Windows
Challenge level:  ****. 4 stars out of 5

Name:  More Windows Maintainers
Description:  Jordi could always use help
Advertisement:  Help free people from the oppression of MSWord today!
Recommended Outline:  You must become magical to know how to fix this.
Comments:  Wouldn't be a bad idea to start with the printing bug...
System:  Windows
Challenge level:  ****. 4 stars out of 5

Bug Update

Bug Statistics

Bug Votes

Verified Bugs

Latest Releases

This section to remain until 1.0.3 has been released.   Additionally, I'm lazy.

Here are links to the latest official releases of AbiWord for various architectures and operating systems.

These are links to snapshot builds of AbiWord for a subset of the supported architectures/operating systems.

Note that the snapshot builds may not work (at all!), but are likely to include more features and have fewer bugs than (older) official releases. Use the official releases for "production systems" and the snapshot builds for testing and when you want to help with Bug triaging.

Special Interest --

From time to time, this section will contain essay-style text about various special interests of the AbiWord development.

SPECIAL NOTICE:   If you're working on a project that is related to, affects the development of or is affected by AbiWord, feel free to contact me