Abiword: Support Expectations

bockman writes "Abiword developers have put up a letter, explaining what they expect from their user community and what the community should (and should not) expect from a volunteer-based open source software project like theirs. A much needed reality-check in these times when a large number of non-developers have joined the Linux users world." This is a must read for anyone who uses any open source software.

Comments

There Must Be Higher Excpectations

[KidSock]

I don't believe this for a second. Word is complex, but I've looked at the Microsoft Word 97 Binary File Format spec (and spent a good week starting to write my own parser) and I don't see the big deal. This stuff is not that hard. Parsing it is actually pretty easy (yes Werner, you were right, a yacc parser is useless). The hard part has nothing to do with Word. These guys are trying to write a word processor which is more about rendering and efficient editing than how it serializes it's state. But there going about it in completely the wrong way. The're trying to build a word processor around the Word format. Separate your peas and carrots guys. Don't limit your exectations to the abilities of Word. These guys should be exploring the proven priciples behind rendering and editors, find a good data structure to represent a document and then deserialize and serialize documents to and from that data structure (a tree) into whatever format you want include .doc, .ps, .html, ....

Re:There Must Be Higher Excpectations

[KidSock]

AbiWord isn't trying to build a word processor around any particular format.

Crap. You just pick apart each format and mush it into whatever form you need at that particular moment. If you had an internal tree representation acting as a common denominator for all serialized forms you could load one format and save to any other. The quality of your implementation is dependant on how much information is preserved in the translation. This is an incremental process so the code should still extract useful data even if youre serialization routines are not complete (instead of completely barfing when an unknown structure is encountered like wvware does).

But import/export is a very boring and uniteresting part of a Word Processor.

What are you talking about? Serialization and deserialization is the key to releasing the information in a document. Do you really think people care more about the damn styles used? Rendering and formatting is secondary. If you don't support rendering some node in the tree, skip it or put an empty View with no children there as a place holder. Skip the styles you don't quite understand for later.

And by the way, the MSWord document format is insanely difficult for mere mortals to understand.

No it's not. I know another MS spec that makes the MSWord97 spec look like a childrens book and it's pretty damn good. They do a good job at communicating the criticals in these "specs". One thing that MS does rather well at is documenting there stuff (e.g. msdn). Yeah, it's not good enough to implement directly from but what do you want; a HOWTO already? Quite frankly it would all be very boring if there was nothing left to be reverse engineered.

I'm sorry guys, I have looked at your code. And it does not take long to see that you do not have the abstractions I'm talking about. This project is all in the design. I'm not going to write a viewer because I think that is clearly a separable project (I'm just exploring Tree *DOC_decode(FILE *in)/void DOC_encode(FILE *out, Tree *tree)) but if I were I might look at projects like BView from BEOS, the W3C's Scaleable Vector Grphics, and other examples of MVC frameworks that use a tree for a model. Of course I could be a little off here because I've spent so little time on the project but I have a feeling you guys are going to get bogged down with details that transcend your code if you don't separate your peas and carrots.

I am not a troll.

Otter and Sheldon, Slashdot Trolls.

[Erris]

Otter:Then there are the free software whackos who think that they're owed the world on a silver platter. But that's a whole other issue...

Gee, thanks for that and all the talk about "Zelots" "spewing". You must get a kick out of abusing the whole free software movement at Slashdot's expense. You even seem to enjoy abusing slashdot itself.

Otter again:I accept that dealing with a desktop Linux installation is a hobby in its own right and that you have to spend time to make it work and deal with some things that justa aren't there.

How insightful. You seemed to have missed the whole point of free software, that superior software comes from sharing the development of common tasks. I'll have to point people who might be misled by you to the free software foundation where they can mull freedom for themselves.

Your comment expresses the existance of something I'm not aware of. Just what is missing from Abi Word, Star Office, KDE Word, or vi/ispell/Latex, for that matter? I use M$ Word everyday because the company forces it on me. Of it's vast capability, 90% is useless fluff that gets broken at each "upgrade", 5% is anoying and must be turned off again at each "upgrade", and the remaining 5% produces spellchecked text with funny characters in a disgusting binary format that gets broken with each "upgrade". I used to use Word Perfect, until M$ broke it ruining their platform. Comercial software has mostly provide me with headaches, and their adverts are bad jokes. I'd like to see the comercial OS that does all that you imply Linux should do before it's ready for the desktop.

Sheldon now:I think you've hit upon the fundamental problem with Open Source. It's not that Open Source is a bad thing, it can actually be quite good. But it's ridiculous to assume it will ever completely replace the commercial software market.

Oh my, there's an echo in this room. Thanks for the recomendation. Now I know just how to get my work done. I'd better throw all that good free software I have at home away fast.

You two virtual people need to get real jobs. I'm really sick of running into you two bullshitters while I'm trying to catch up on news.