Report: Abiword on Wine

Subject: Report: Abiword on Wine
From: Alan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Thu Nov 01 2001 - 09:59:50 CST

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running Abiword on Wine, a short report by Alan Horkan
the content is text and i really should just cut and paste it into an
email, but im in hurry.
(and i should probably send a link rather than an attachment, but im in
a real hurry)
apologies in advance for my bad etiquette.

i meant to send this yesterday but SneakerNet technology tends to suffer
very high latency problems (i left the disk at home by mistake).

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<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE abw PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD ABW 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.abisource.com/awml.dtd"> <abiword version="0.9.2" fileformat="1.0">

<pagesize pagetype="A4" orientation="portrait" width="210.000000" height="297.000000" units="mm" page-scale="1.000000"/> <section> <c props="lang:en-IE; text-decoration:underline; font-weight:bold">Abiword on Wine.</c><c props="lang:en-IE"> </c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="lang:en-IE">I thought it might be interesting to see how well Abiword worked on Wine, and that it might even reveal some subtle but useful ways to improve Abiword. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c><c props="lang:en-IE">It was not a good idea. I started by trying to write this report running Abiword on wine, but if you’ll excuse the pun Abiword seemed drunk. I decided to start over and use the Gnome version to write the report intstead. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="lang:en-IE">At first glance the program opened and seemed reasonable normal, but as soon as you type a few words you’ll start to notice some problems. The fonts seem oversized, more like 16 point than 12 point and as a result look thicker and darker almost as if they were bold. Even before you have typed a full line of text you can see that it has already gone outside the the margins. When your text spills onto the next line, or you hit return the cursor has not moved down a full line and any newly typed text gets superimposed on top of the existing line. (I tried saving what i have written so far and opening it but it still rendered incorrectly). </c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="lang:en-IE">The spellchecker worked fine, within the dialog the text was displayed correctly. (Which is more than i can say for the Mandrake who neglected to install the relevant dictionary for my locale, leaving me with no spelling checking, and i definately dont think i should have to do this myself). </c> <c props="lang:en-IE">The toolbars - or coolbars is i beleive what Microsoft calls their implementation - cannot be moved, if you add in a new toolbar then the icons will not be drawn/displayed and the toobar apperas blank, although if you minimize then restore the window they will then be drawn. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE">The toolbars are not as nicely fitted to the components as they are in windows, and you can see a little vertical seprate bar artifact behind the toolbar menus (ie the font style, font size menu) this was an old bug that is no longer visable on windows. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE">The menus are spaced out a bit wider than they should be but this is only a harmless cosmetic bug. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE">If you try to open any of the Help items which link to exteranl items such as the Help documentation it will fail, displaying a little message and then continuing normally. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="lang:en-IE">Maybe Halloween was not the most appropriate day for this. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="lang:en-IE">Ill leave it at that. Abiword on Wine is effectively unusuable primarlily </c><c props="font-family:Times New Roman; text-decoration:none; color:000000; font-size:12pt; text-position:normal; font-weight:normal; font-style:normal; lang:en-IE">because of the really awful text rendering. I</c><c props="lang:en-IE"> might give it another go with a more up the latest versions of both Wine and Abiword (and also see how well it works if you over ride the Wine dlls and use the native microsoft dlls instead). It was an interesting thought and my curiousity is satisfied for now. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="text-decoration:underline; lang:en-IE">Specifications</c><c props="lang:en-IE">:</c> <c props="lang:en-IE">Mandrake Linux 8.1 </c> <c props="lang:en-IE">Wine: wine-cvs-unstripped-052601-1_i386.rpm</c> <c props="lang:en-IE">Abiword 0.9.4pre (win32)</c> <c props="lang:en-IE">Abiword 0.9.2 (linux)</c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="text-decoration:underline; lang:en-IE">Proviso</c><c props="lang:en-IE">:</c> <c props="lang:en-IE">The version of Wine used is not particularly up to date and is from May of this year (2001) and the time of writing was 31</c><c props="text-position:superscript; lang:en-IE">st</c><c props="lang:en-IE"> October. </c> <c props="lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="text-position:normal; lang:en-IE">I have done the absolute bare minimum configuration of Wine. </c> <c props="text-position:normal; lang:en-IE"></c><c props="text-position:normal; lang:en-IE">[I copied the config file from /etc/wine/config to ~/.wine/config set up the drive letter mappings (including pointing C:\ to my mounted windows 98 partitioned drive. </c> <c props="text-position:normal; lang:en-IE">I set up the paths for Windows, System, Profile]</c> <c props="text-position:normal; lang:en-IE">I have NOT allowed Wine to overiride any of its built in dlls to use any of the available native dlls from Windows, which i beleive would have given much better performance. </c> <c props="text-position:normal; lang:en-IE"></c> <c props="text-position:normal; lang:en-IE"></c> </section> </abiword>

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