Subject: 0.7.11
bob@abisource.com
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 15:45:35 CDT
is out...
Those of you familiar with this project know that it has been about 3
months since AbiWord 0.7.10, and that means it is a new release is long
overdue. We have been busy getting features in place in preparation for
feature freeze which comes at AbiWord 0.9.0. It's been quite a ride since
AbiWord 0.7.10. We have had many new contributors. For this release more
so than previously, often times a lot of work went in "under the hood".
This makes it hard to give everyone appropriate credit, since their work is
not always prominently visible. For these people, virtue will have to be
its own reward.
Here is the rundown of what is new in AbiWord 0.7.11:
1. Column dialog. Bruce Pearson grabbed one of the few remaining dialogs
that still needed to be created; the Columns dialog. Now you can adjust
columns and column spacing from the dialog rather than messing around with
the ruler controls.
2. Zoom. Bruce Pearson (does that name sound familiar?) also finished off
the zoom dialog so that now you can zoom to page size. This kind of
touch-up dialog work really shows how much closer AbiWord is getting to
version 1.0.
3. Insert Picture. Michael Pritchett added an Insert Picture dialog.
This dialog offers a small preview window so that you can see what you are
trying to add. Michael did a thorough job making sure this dialog Just
Works, and is another example of how the AbiWord development team is paying
close attention to user's expectations.
4. GoTo. The Goto dialog had suffered a rough beginning, first making its
appearance in AbiWod 0.7.9, and then disappearing in 0.7.10. Thomas Briggs
finished up the work required to make this dialog modeless and got it back
into AbiWord to stay.
5. Automatic exception handling. It's always gratifying to see AbiWord
get a useful feature that no other word processor has. Sam TH added
support for automatic exception handling. This means that should AbiWord
crash for some unknown reason, the document you are working on will be
saved right then and there. Of course, everyone hopes Sam's feature will
never be used, but he will be held in high regard when it does. This
feature is for UNIX systems only.
6. Major BeOS progress. Christopher Plymire added so many updates to the
BeOS build, there is no way I could list them all here. He added all
missing dialogs relative to the Windows and Linux ports and fixed most of
the major bugs. With all of Christopher's work, plus some help from
Ithamar Adema, AbiWord for BeOS is now ready for prime time.
7. Better help. David Schmitter added a help menu that now directly
references the main help files. Add to that edits to the help files
themselves by Christophe Caron, Karl Ove Hufthammer and Ashleigh Gordon,
and you have an integrated help system beginning to take shape. There are
still some minor issues to work out, but getting everything in place was
the first step.
8. Alternate font handling. There are lots of features a good word
processor has that most people only notice when they are missing. One of
these is proper handling of alternate fonts such as symbols and dingbats.
Bill Carpenter did a great job tracking down many of these problems, such
as import of smart quotes from RTF and MSWord documents, and making sure
the spell checker didn't get caught on them.
9. Bug fixes. There was a quite a bit of bug fixing going on behind the
scenes. In many cases, these were issues we didn't even realize were there
until the fix came in! An all-inclusive list would be too long, but some
of the highlights are #910: paragraph control now work more intuitively
(Bruce Perason), #919: Change button in Spell dialog now works correctly
(Thomas Briggs), #935: Cursor artifact removed (Big Ed), #944: keyboard
shortcuts added for default styles. (Karl Hufthammer) Improved
Find/Replace algorithm: (Allan Clark and Anders Melchiorsen), Dragging
ruler marks now forces pages to autoscroll and printing accenterd
characters on UNIX: (Aaron Lehman), Soft hyphen are now supported: (Martin
Vermeer), Headers are now centered in HTML export (Joseph Kelsey), better
handling of Ignored Words (Bill Carpenter).
10. Translations. Tim Allen reworked the Field and Goto dialogs so that
the text within the dialog could also be translated. These and other
additions led to the following translation updates: Catalan (Jesús
Corrius), Danish (Birger Langkjer), Finnish (Jarmo Karvonen), German
(Harald Fernengel), Indonesian (Tim Allen), Italian (Marco Innocentri),
Norwegian Nynorsk translations (Karl Hufthammer), Norwegian BOK
translations (Karl Kalleberg), Polish (Eutanazy Sercxemulo), Portuguese
(Rob Silva), Spanish (Joaquin Cuenca Abela) and Swedish (Henrik Berg).
Also, Owen Thomas added a Welch translation.
11. Import/Export. Michael Pritchitt added support for BMP import. Most
Windows users have these all over their system; now you can put them into
your AbiWord documents. On a totally different front, David Nay added
support for PalmDoc export. Now you can save AbiWord documents and read
them on a Palm.
12. GNOME. Work on getting AbiWord more GNOME-ified continues. Dom
Lachowicz a GNOME print dialog and the column dialog. Joaquin Cuenca
Abelac also added capabilities to Show/Hide the status bar as well
toolbars; the toolbars are much more configurable now due to his work both
on the GUI and underlying preferences. Also, Peter Haight made AbiWord a
little more robust relative to finding the default fonts.
13. Ports. Thomas Fletcher still continues to make major headway on the
QNX port. As of AbiWord 0.7.11, AbiWord for QNX is on par feature for
feature with Windows and Linux. In other porting news, Hubert Figurer
started a MacOS X port of AbiWord. This is a great port in and of itself,
and yet it will help the MacOS port go forward as the MacOS X port requires
less work that a rough MacOS port while still solving some of the eventual
problems.
For those people who just can't get enough, here is a quick peek at what is
coming. Martin Sevior has a well-functioning list implementation. They are
currently being tested and the major kinks have been worked out. They have
not been incorporated into the release builds yet until the final file
format is nailed down. Expect to see lists in the next release. Also,
Dom Lachowicz has been continuing work on MSWord export. AbiWord will
soon be able to export to MSWord format for simple cases. Also, the Tabs
dialog is being worked on, and should show up in the near future thanks to
Martin Sevior and Bruce Pearson. Finally, Sam TH has starting working on
page numbering edging that feature closer to completion and inclusion.
Justin Bradford has been spending time deep in the guts of AbiWord getting
it ready for vector image formats such as SVG. As always, more to come!
Robert Sievers
Open Source Evangelist
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