AbiWord Community Outreach Project

Original Mention, Blogger’s Reply

We have yet another reply to a mention here on the ACOP blog, this time from the user who had a funky file that only opened in Notepad, and which didn’t open in AbiWord. I would agree that notepad is a relatively mature product, but this is made easier by the fact that it is very simple. (The whole concept of import/export is beyond it, as it is simply a plain-text buffer that only complains a little if you try to open a binary file in it, and it barely handles encodings). I don’t think it’s undergone that much revision - I mean, the Ctrl-S shortcut for save was added in Windows 2000! Other text editors for Windows, such as metapad, are much more featureful and useful and just as “mature” - a plain text editor is a whole lot easier to write than a full word processor.

AbiWord import/export support is a constant work in progress, and we have a Summer of Code student funded by Google working right now to make a lot of improvements - many of these have already shown up in 2.4.5, which is available now.

I have a minor factual quibble with the reply - AbiWord has actually been around since around 1998 (that’s the earlier copyrights on the code - my guess for where the 2002 number came from is that version 1.0 (which followed a series of 0.7 and 0.9 releases which were highly useable), was released then).

As one might guess, I would also urge that the “numerous missing features” as well as the original document that caused the problem (or a similar one exhibiting that or any other problem) be filed in the AbiWord Bugzilla. If those missing features were obvious to everyone, someone would have implemented them by now most likely since lots of people use AbiWord in their day to day work and play. One thing that I’ve found in my work in personal end-user support is that everyone has their own idea of how everybody else does things and what the “only logical” way to do something is. This is not a criticism, just an observation that anecdotal, subjective opinions about usability matters are less valuable for developers, yet much more important for those responsible for training. (You’d never believe how many different ways there are to dial up to the internet and check your email on Windows, for instance) With reference to the RTF import bug, if the document truly was valid in some reasonable editor, we should be able to at least make headway in importing it. If it’s not valid, under no circumstances should we crash or hang, and trying to display some data at all is better than giving up. (The LibWPD WordPerfect import library recently went through a strenuous QA review by one of our QA folks, Sum1, and so it is now a shining example of this ideal, opening more corrupted WordPerfect documents than even WordPerfect itself.) I think a general judgement about the “maturity” of AbiWord is misguided, as the design from day 1 was very well thought out and mature, and the implementation has been “mature” enough to use for nearly all tasks since late in the 2.0 series or 2.2, IMHO, though I know of people who thought it was mature long before then. One import error does not a word processor define - that’s what bug reports are for.

Regarding the Mac OS X rendering, yes, we know this is a work in progress. We have only one active Mac OS X developer, who (like all of the core developers) volunteers his time (unlike the vast majority of OO.o developers, who work on the project through their employment with Sun, Novell, etc). Unfortunately he is very busy at the moment. Contributions are always welcome, and if you have any experience in Mac OS X development and would like to help out, please drop us an email or drop by the IRC channel, and we’ll see what we can do to get you going. (As a work around, you may use the latest 2.2 release - while it is much less featureful and has numerous bugs that have been resolved since, the text rendering quality is better. This is a stop-gap measure at best, though.)

Thanks for taking the time to elaborate, Scott! Feedback, especially in the form of bug reports or code contributions, is greatly appreciated! (BTW: Any impression of a “tone of disbelief” was most likely mis-interpreted terseness due to the number of blog entries I look through to make these posts, combined with a desire to see a test case document in Bugzilla so that the problem could be resolved. Sorry about that!)