AbiWord 0.7.10

This week, AbiWord reached yet another milestone as we released Version 0.7.10, and continued our push towards 1.0. Significant improvements in the new release included:

• GNOME Builds
• Modeless Dialogs
• Help Files
• GoTo Dialog
• Lots of bug fixes
• and much more.

More information is available in this posting.

Development News

This week we had a total of 64 new patches in the tree since 0.7.10 was release, or in only 5 days. We had no new contributors this week.

The most significant patch of the week was Justin's support for vector images This is a feature that has been much talked about previously, but finally we have code in the tree for it. It does not yet support actual images being drawn, but they are properly maintained and saved, and a neat substitute picture is drawn. Further support should come soon. For his work this week, on image importing and making AbiWord Just Work, Justin wins this week's $299 Patch Prize. Congratulations.

Also this week bitmap (BMP) image support was added, by Michael Pritchett. Soon, AbiWord will support as many image types as a modern word processor should, plus others such as SVG. We can also now open images on the command line, thanks again to Justin, who also improved the color support in the BMP patch.

The other major checkin was Martin's patch to make the find and Replace dilalogs modeless on Unix and GNOME.

Most of the rest of the checkins this weeks were bug fixes, from Aaron, Martin, Justin and others. Fixed bugs included 703, 900, 919 and 862.

Finally, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer fixed bugs so that AbiWord runs both on the latest versions of GCC and on the IA64 (hich has yet to be released). Impressive.

On the i18n front, Tim Allen improved the GoTo dialog's support for other languages, and improved the Indonesian translation.

On The List

This week we had 188 messages posted to the abiword-dev list, from which some the topics included:

1. 1.0 Jobs - Sam posted a long list of things to be fixed from 1.0, which stimuated discussion on everything from code freezes to smart quotes.

2. AbiWord 0.7.10 - As previously noted, we released this week. The annoucment naturally generated talk on the list.

3. Styles Dialog - Owen (of the strings script) suggested a styles dialog, and volunteered to write it. This caused people both to commend him, and to mention that much of the backend is already written.

4. Build System - Aaron complained this week about Make, and suggested potential alternatives, such as autoconf, to make life easier.

5. Images - Both new image types (vector and bitmap) generated discussion both about the implementation, and potential new bugs.

6. GNOME Internationalisation - Currently, our GNOME port uses GNOME localized text, which does not include Indonesian. Tim Allen wondered if we should override this.

Bugzilla Status

Currently, Bugzilla lists 191 bugs outstanding, with 16 of those still in SUBMIT state. Since last week, the bug total has increased by 3, with 19 new bugs filed.

Other News

This week's cool post award goes to Bob, for his excellent release notes for 0.7.10.