From: Jesper Skov (jskov@zoftcorp.dk)
Date: Mon May 20 2002 - 07:56:43 EDT
On Mon, 2002-05-20 at 13:27, Rebecca Rohan wrote:
>
> Hi, Jesper.
>
> These are the "negative" questions from throughout the review, which took place mainly on Windows. Please remember that I don't ask questions about the positives, because nobody ever complains when those are wrong. ;)
Fair enough, if you remember to mention some of the good stuff too :)
Again, I've copied this mail to the developer list since I don't know
the answer to the first two. Hopefully someone with Windows experience
can answer them.
It may be worth pointing out that, IIRC, you were using AbiWord
0.99.sumphin, not the 1.0.1 release. Some of the problems you saw may
have ben fixed there - you could give it a quick go while waiting for
someone else two answer the questions in detail.
You can find a link to the latest Windows release in the AbiWord Weekly
News issue 92 I just finished:
http://www.abisource.com/information/news/2002/awn92.phtml
> 1. Why do some of the symbols programmed into Format/Bullets and Numbering not exist? (I did the full install, except for associating DOC and RTF with AbiWord.) It also doesn't honor WingDing (font) bullets (for example) in Word documents, even though WingDings are on the system.
>
> 2. Why don't pictures in word documents show? Is it because the originals may not have been BMP or PNG? Are those the only images the Windows version reads?
>
> 3. No mail merge or tables, right?
Yes and no.
Mail merge: there is an (at present incomplete) scripting interface that
allows somthing like mail merge. There's even an example script to do
just that, IIRC. In a build with the feature available, it should be
possible to select a menu point which will do the magic (IIRC using
address entries from the GNOME address application). But it needs more
polish before we'd want users to have access to it.
It's worth pointing out though that any feature like mail merge will be
implemented in a plugin module. This will ensure that the main AbiWord
word processor remains a lean program which will be able to address most
common word processing needs for most users, while allowing users that
need special functionality to add extra features separately, which plug
into the main menu system. And the adding of features can all be done in
ways that makes it simple to do for the user, so the user should not
worry about keeping track of various features having to be downloaded
from various places.
In short: we want to keep abiword a lean program, free of all the
compulsory bloat that other word processors appear happy to inflict on
all their unsupecting users :)
As for tables, it is something that will be added to AbiWord 1.2. It's a
non-trivial thing to do, which is the primary reason for it not being in
AbiWord 1.0 (AbiWord 1.0 is a quite usable word processor for texts
where tables are not needed, so we felt it important to release it
before undertaking the job of adding table support). Martin Sevior from
Australia is driving this work. I don't believe there's any guranteed
deadline for this work, but I'd be surprised if AbiWord doesn't support
tables before Xmas.
And just for completenes, while AbiWord 1.0 does not have tables, it
does have outlining support, which allows you to "draw" table borders
around text. They are not comparable to tables as far as usability goes,
but they can be used as a simple replacement if necessary.
> I really love the "any color" highlights and text!
Thanks! I'm sure whoeverdonnit will be happy to know :)
Cheers,
Jesper
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