Subject: Feature Request and Gratitude
From: Derek Harmison (dh@ilcs.net)
Date: Sun Jun 18 2000 - 17:56:24 CDT
As a non-technical end user of abiword and open source software
broadly, I would like to offer my sincere thanks and
congratulations to those developers that donate their time and
energy to building whup-ass applications for people like me. In
the three years that I have been experimenting with open source
software, the quality, quantity, and usability of the software for
the desktop has improved tremendously.
I run abiword on FreeBSD 4.0. I had no problems building abiword
from the source using the FreeBSD patches in the ports collection,
and I have no problems running abiword (well except for the
spell-as-you-go checker).
The De-"deja-vu all over again"-icizer:
Make better use of the XML format by adding fields on the
save dialogue for "title", "keyword", and "description" meta
tags to make any abiword document searchable.
Professors, students, authors, journalists, ministers, and people
like me would benefit tremendously from searchability. I want to
be able to open a new document, write a few paragraphs about
something, save it, and move on to something else. Later, I will
want to be able to open a local search page in my web browser,
enter keywords, see the documents on my local drive that match my
query and a short description of the document, and click on a
hyperlink to open abiword with the document. Then I can refresh
my memory with what I have already written about an idea to avoid
rewriting it.
If it works for me, it works for a corporation. The easiest way
to build a knowledge base has to be to create searchable documents
in the first place. And in this environment, gnumeric offers the
same potential.
Although I don't know the answer to the html/xml compatiblity for
search engines question, the answer has to be either yes, xml
documents are searchable with existing html search engines, or it
is a trivial matter to adapt an html search engine to search xml
documents.
Laundry List:
I prefer one abiword window handle all open documents.
I can't turn spell-as-you-go off even if the preference
is deactivated.
Spell-as-you-go marks partial words as mis-spelled if you use
the backspace to correct them.
Sometimes a character that has been erased appears
appears overwritten in the first position of the
current line.
I liked the blue "A" logo much better than the ant thing on
the splash screen.
The formatting toolbar stretches off my screen (800x600).
I've got another idea that I will save for a little later as it
belongs in the bluesky catagory. I would like to encourage
developers to continue to think critically about features and
their implementation. Some traditional word processor features
have never been implemented well and some functions have never
been offered as part of a word processor that clearly belong while
others that are offered in word processors never belonged to begin
with.
Once again thank-you for generously contributing your time and
expertise to developing an exceptional open source word
processor. Abiword is certainly usable now and no doubt will
continue to impress with future releases. Congratulations!
Derek Harmison
dh@ilcs.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sun Jun 18 2000 - 18:00:24 CDT