Re: Abiword and Images

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006, Giancarlo wrote:

> Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:25:26 +0200
> From: Giancarlo <gcmelzi@yahoo.it>
> To: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Subject: Abiword and Images
>
>
> Team,
> I recently installed Xubuntu on my old PC: it's mainly used by my
> wife for emails, and my daughter for emails, msn and writing docs.
> She started using AbiWord and she is happy with it: quite better and
> quicker then the old version of MS Word she had under WinME on the same
> system.

Abiword can run on Wine so I must check that you are running (not just the
GTK version but) the Gnome version of Abiword? The gnome version in
particular uses Gnome print and produces higher quality and more reliable
printing well worth the small extra requirements (Gnome is not actually
required).

> Everything was perfect, until she asked me to insert a picture (a jpeg
> image) into the file:
> - the file size increased with no reason

Adding an image will not link to it but include it directly inside the
file, unlike how it works with a web page.

As Hubert mentioned the JPEG is getting converted into PNG. On top of
that it is getting converted to text using base64 encoding.

The upside is that if you were to use ZABW the file size would come back
down significantly but it still wouldn't be ideal.

The abiword developers have been aware of the limitations and downsides of
this approach since the beginning but OpenOffice didn't exist at the time.
I expect if they were doing things again they would use a zip container
like OpenDocument but any change now would break back compatibility.

Even if developers were interested in adjusting the file format there
would be a massive onslaught of even more questions about switching
entirely over to the OpenDocument standard.

File format changes wouldn't gain many user visible improvements and with
the other difficulties outlines I'm not surprised no one is rushing to
work on it. At best the most likely point of progress would be to cut out
the extra JPEG -> PNG conversion which would help significantly.

> - it takes ages to do everything

If you check bugzilla there are a few known issues which you may have
stubled upon but just in case you have found something new an example
document could be helpful in tracking it down.

> Btw, I've tried printing to .pdf and then printing the .pdf /got/: same
> result, although Evince shows everything perfect.

From that it does sound like you are using the Gnome version of
abiword and you may have found a bug in the printing system.

> Haven't seen these problems between bugs (although several printing
> problems are listed), so may be it's just something solved, already.
> Can you provide some help, please ?

I'm not as familiar with all the bugs listed in the tracker as I used to
be but it doesn't immediately jump out at me as a known problem but others
may know better.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

-----------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to
abiword-user-request@abisource.com with the word
unsubscribe in the message body.
Received on Fri, 15 Sep 2006 02:48:35 +0100 (BST)