AbiWord 2.0 - The Next Step

(Toward World Domination)

Martin Sevior and Dominic Lachowicz

New features in 2.0

AbiWord 2.0 has many new features not present in the 1.0 release. There are features that provide improvements to the AbiWord User Interface and those that increase the richness of the Word Processing document. The following table lists new Word Processing features and the file formats the feature is exported to and imported from. Of course all features are supported by the AbiWord native XML file format.

Feature	Imported from	Exported to.
Tables	MS Word, RTF, WordPerfect, HTML, OpenOffice.org, DocBook, (other XML formats)	RTF, HTML, Latex, DocBook, (other XML formats)
Footnotes	RTF,MSWord, WordPerfect	RTF, Latex
Endnotes	RTF, MSWord, WordPerfect	RTF, Latex
Revision Marks
MailMerge

The Table feature in AbiWord is very powerful. Cells within tables can be merged either horizontally or vertically via an easy-to-use non-modal dialog. Rows and Columns heights and widths can be adjusted interactively by dragging ruler controls or table lines. The unix build includes a powerful automatic table insert widget which allows tables dimensions to be created interactively. We also have the ability to nest tables to arbitrary depth. This feature is not available in either Word Perfect or Open Office.

Feature	Platform
Automatic Font detection	New to Unix for 2.0
Anti-aliased text	New to Unix for 2.0
Gtk 2.0 GUI elements	New to Unix for 2.0
Gnome 2 integration	The Gnome Intergration features include: Drag and drop images from Nautilus Embed AbiWord in Nautilus Drag and drop URL's and images from Galeon/Epihany/Mozilla into AbiWord Embed AbiWord in Evolution 2 Use GIMP plugin to edit images within AbiWord Use of the GNOME-DB database interface for mail-merge or plugin.
Drag images interactively	All
Resize images interactively	All
Selection colour is based on Theme	Unix, Windows
Font preview from drop down list	All
Drag and drop text editing	All
Many improvements in import/export filters	All

The start of the 2.0 cycle.

The long term goal of AbiWord has always been to provide the best Word Processor in the World and to make it available on every interesting computing platform. Our first stable release, 1.0, has sufficient features and ease of use to be useful for a large number of ordinary users. In the minds of the developers we kept the idea of "The Church Secretary" as being our target user. Someone with limited interest in computers and who just wants to get their work done.

To this end the original AbiWord developers (who have almost completely ceased contributing to development) imagined a program rather similar to MicroSoft Word. We have followed this vision and created a genuine WYSIWYG application.  

I think we largely succeeded in this goal and the feature of the 1.0 series has most of the features needed for simple home use. However, we were clearly a long way from fulfilling the needs of everyone who uses Word Processors. In particular, one of the authors, has the ambition to use AbiWord as the only Word Processor he and his family needs at work, home, School and for a micro-business. To fulfill our long term goal of being the World Best's Word processing software we clearly needed more features and better usability. To this end we started the development of 2.0 with the aim of overcoming many of existing limitations in the 1.0 codebase while keeping as much of the code we hard worked so hard to develop.

To this end, we made many long term investments in the AbiWord code base. These include:

• Changed the internal text representation to unsigned 32 bit (from unsigned 16 bit). This allows us to represent a very large fraction the World's language characters as a single, uniquely addressable word.
• A major refactoring of the text layout classes to allows us to represent complex text structures like tables, footnotes and endnotes.
• Enhancements to our PieceTable (which is the model of our document in our Model-View-Controller, MVC) to allow advanced structures like tables, Revision Marks, Hidden text and Mail-Merge.
• Move to the GTK 2 toolkit.
• Use of fontconfig and XFT2 drawing to allow automatic font detection and anti-aliased text drawing.
• Refactoring of the cross application architecture to remove duplicated code and to share more code between different platforms.
• Use of an abstract text layout architecture which guarantees 100% WYSIWYG text layout at all resolutions and for all printers.
• Move to the new GNOME2 architecture in particular the use of Bonobo-2 to allow AbiWord to be easily embedded in Nautilus-2, Evolution-1.4 and any other application that needs a Word Processor.
• Move to HIG-compliant dialogs
• and of course lots and lots of code to actually enable all the new features.

It is worth emphasizing that a huge amount of the code we wrote for 2.0 is basic infrastructure that will be leveraged in future releases as we add more features. With this infrastructure in place the project can now be developed at a much faster pace.

Features of 2.0 in detail.

Here is a screen shot of AbiWord-2.0 being used to prepare this document.

The Table feature. Compared to the 1.0 release there are two obvious differences. The first is there is now a table entry on the menu bar. The second is extra toolbar used for table controls. As mentioned earlier our table feature is quite rich and powerful. Cells within tables can be merged across both multiple rows and multiple columns.