Back from Ottawa and Desktop Developer Conference. I now have my head full of nice ideas for AbiWord, some crazy, some less:

Use UniConf for the preferences. This would be more a proof of concept and a toy to play with than a real feature for AbiWord. I don't see that very hard to do. Add that to my crazyness.

Write a Cairo backend for AbiWord. This is more sane, and somewhat a big work, but it is good crack. Here are the reasons:

Pro:

  • one backend for Mac, Win and Gtk. Bug will be down to Cairo and not to each platform...
  • SVG support will be way easier. We need SVG support.

Cons:

  • Cairo maturity. But if nobody use it, who will test it ? AbiWord pioneered with XML for the file format.
  • One more dependency, which seems to be a concern for win32 developers. Nothing that can't be solved.
  • Performance. Again, that will give a real test case.

And I think I'll move my Gtk+-MacOS X work in gtk+-2.7 branch (I mean rebranch from there) to use Cairo as well. Now it makes sense.