Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Thursday 25 June 2009

8 years later

8 years after I filed bug 1349 in AbiWord, I implemented it. Definitely something that should have been done sooner.

It is about JPEG support. AbiWord has been able to import JPEG images for a good while, but it always converted the JPEG to PNG for internal storage. This is IMHO wrong, but at the time it was debated that it was the right tradeoff to allow using AbiWord on embedded platforms (I'm too lazy to dig up the archive). Anyway.

Tuesday I sat down and implemented the JPEG support, removing cruft, and cleaning up the rest. Basically when import and bitmap image, if the format is JPEG, the JPEG stream is kept as is, otherwise we convert to PNG, as usual. It hit SVN last night. The bonus is that a file with a JPEG in it will open properly in AbiWord 2.6 (and likely older), so even the issue I had with compatibility isn't.

This is probably the last real feature implemented for 2.8, and it will be in 2.7.6. Back to bug fixing.

Monday 8 June 2009

AbiWord 2.7.3

Marc released AbiWord 2.7.3 this week-end. I used the release to update the packages from Maemo since I fixed many of the issues that were filed against it. It should appear in the tablet's Application Manager if you have the extras-devel repository.

Note: there won't be any update to 2.6.x, as 2.7.3 should already be much better. Only Maemo 4.x is supported (only tested on 4.1 aka Diablo on a N800).

Update: if you don't have the extras-devel repository, you can install it. Diablo (4.1)

Update 2: and please, DO file bugs.