uwog.net » olpc

Improving complex language support in AbiWord

admin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 12:10:32 +0000

I’ve spent the last week or so learning enough about complex languages to be able to fix a bunch of complex text related bugs in AbiWord. First of all our cursor movement was broken as we didn’t respect text cluster boundaries. The same was true for deleting or backspacing through text clusters. I found an old but good bug report that clearly explained what was supposed to happen and how we failed to do that, which was a great help.
Then there was a bug in our font substitution code that resulted in totally unreadable text, which was caused by a bad bad bug in our font caching mechanism.
And finally we greatly screwed up rendering text selections. This was caused by a bug in the code that fed substrings to pango, which seemed like an overly complex procedure to my untrained eye. As far as I can see I only have things like pango_cairo_show_glyph_string at my disposal, which can’t render substrings. I have no clue why not. Uniscribe’s ScriptTextOut on Windows can do that, so it is not theoretically impossible I guess.

All these fixes are part of AbiWord 2.8.4, which I released yesterday. I’d love to get some feedback from people familiar with complex scripts if AbiWord is behaving as it should now. I’m most unsure about our cursor movement and selections in RtL languages, but surely we have more bugs that I’m unaware of :)

Please test it!

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

AbiWord in Google SoC and v2.8.3 Released!

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:22:19 +0000

AbiWord 2.8.3
Just released AbiWord 2.8.3. This release fixes an annoying libxml-related crasher and good number OpenDocument filter improvements, such as support for password protected OpenDocument files.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Google Summer Of Code
AbiWord has been accepted into the Google Summer of Code program again this year! If you are a student and interested in hacking on the word processor that is used by millions of children in the world, then please sign up! We posted some project ideas on our wiki, but if you have a better idea, then we are certainly interested!

I spot a brown paper bag

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:31:03 +0000

The AbiWord 2.8.0 Windows release was fine, but the Linux one contained an annoying bug leading to random crashes. This lead me to release AbiWord 2.8.1 and fire our entire QA team. If you use AbiWord 2.8.0 on Windows, then you are perfectly up to date and don’t need this release. Linux/FreeBSD/Hurd/etc. packagers and people compiling AbiWord for themselves will want to grab this release.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

AbiWord 2.8 and AbiCollab released!

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:55:31 +0000

All the fun stuff can be found in the AbiWord 2.8.0 release notes, so read them! Also make sure to check out our new collaboration webservice AbiCollab.net.

Impressive AbiWord release

admin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:19:44 +0000

We just released AbiWord 2.7.6, which is an awesome release in my opinion!
It for example adds native JPEG support, so we don’t convert every JPEG internally to PNG anymore. This will be of great benefit on the OLPC laptop, where kids use built-in camera to produce photos in JPEG format and add them to their document. This will greatly reduce the filesize of their document. It will also be a lot less bandwidth intensive when collaborating on such a document.
Other big changes are the greatly improved OOXML import and export filters. This work is done during this years Google Summer of Code OOXML import filter improvement program by Firat Kiyak. It was just too good to not merge it already.
Lots more stuff in is listed in the changelog, make sure to read it! All this work was done during the last 2 weeks, which I find very impressive.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

And another one: AbiWord 2.7.3 Released!

admin — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:55:30 +0000

We just released AbiWord 2.7.3. The most visible addition to this release is the return of our Maemo support (packages were already being built I was told). Also AbiWord will now be able to gracefully handle and repair a bigger set of corrupt documents. Finally we fixed a bunch of crashers while working towards the next stable release.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

AbiWord 2.7.2 Released!

admin — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:56:35 +0000

Just released AbiWord 2.7.2. This release adds support for uppercase, lowercase, and capitalized character styles, and comes with a Windows release.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

First AbiWord Development Release: v2.7.0

admin — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:44:15 +0000

We’ve just released AbiWord v2.7.0, which is the first development release towards our stable v2.8.0 release. Changes include Annotation/Comment support, Smart Quotes, Multi-Page View, true SVG/WMF support, use GTK Print in favor of the deprecated gnome-print, improved collaboration support, tons of import/export filter improvements, and more…!

Some first reactions are in: “Ohhh, it’s pretty!” - unnamed source, “It’s so innovative!” - unnamed source, “I want one for my kids!” - unnamed source, to list a few. Go get it to see what the people are talking about (free copies until we’re out of stock)!

AbiWord 2.6.8 Released!

admin — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:14:12 +0000

Just released AbiWord 2.6.8. This release contains a good number of fixes, most notably fixes to the auto-save function, improvements to the OpenDocument filters (thanks NLnet!) and a good number of memory leak fixes.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

2009-03-03

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:39:41 +0000

A lot has been happening in AbiWord land lately. We’re close to a 2.6.7 stable release which will include some nice memory leak fixes and a nice set of OpenDocument filter improvements (the first of hopefully a long list of improvements made possible by NLnet).

On the development branch front, people have been working hard on moving our graphics classes over to Cairo. At the moment, we have a different rendering implementation on all of our platforms (Linux, Mac OSX and Windows), but in the future we hope to unify them all into a single Cairo based implementation. The most recent development is making our Mac OSX port build again, after being not available for the 2.6.x series:

AbiWord’s development branch builds again on Mac OSX

The rendering is still suboptimal, but with the move to Cairo I hope we can have a fully working OSX version in the not too distant future again.