Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Tuesday 17 May 2005

AbiWord 2.3.0

AbiWord 2.3.0 has been released a last week. It is the first development version for our upcoming 2.4.0 release.

There won't be a MacOS X build for that release. Wait for 2.3.1 as we have been lagging behind a bit.

Thursday 5 May 2005

Newsroom

AbiWord to the rescue to save people with proprietary formats. Lesson #1 lack of interoperability with other format even when you are the de-facto monopoly will screw you up one day. That is what happens with Word that do not install file format converter... (that is why importing WinWord 2 or Word 5.0 for Mac documents would rock in AbiWord)

Wednesday 4 May 2005

Major AbiWord MacOS X fixes

AbiWord on MacOS X had broken justified text display for a few month, and that is really bad. See bug 8384 and all its duplicates. I hadn't used AbiWord on Mac for some time, and I wanted to update some document I had on a CD that the crappry CD-ROM drive in my PC is unable to read. So I did read it on the MacMini and used AbiWord for that. That is what made me fix that bug. Not that I wouldn't have, but I was not really aware of that as it was working when I left the code last year.

It appears that a change in December to support Bi-directional languages removed the code to draw word by word justified text and use the inter-word gap as specified to the GR_Graphics::drawChars(). The UNIX code use Xft to draw chars one by one, but MacOS X is not very fast to do that.

So I reimplemented that with the new code, but broke the bi-directional languages support (programming by side effects). That will be fixed differently as since Tomas has added hooks to tell whether we support that or not. At the same time I commented that part to explain why I do that. I expect to have simplier code by then. Ultimately I may rewrite this using ATSUI.