uwog.net

Happy 1st week Amélie!

admin — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 19:32:45 +0000

A very happy first week to my baby daughter Amélie! She was born last Sunday, May 27th, and she and her lovely mother are doing very well. During the day she is total cuteness, rainbows and unicorns, while at night she turns into a hungry monster! A cute monster, but still… :P

Welcome to this world Amélie!

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.

AbiWord 2.7.8 out

admin — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 23:29:22 +0000

I hope we will only have to do 1 more development release after this one, before we can release AbiWord 2.8.0. Already looking forward to it. In the meantime, you’ll have to be happy with AbiWord 2.7.8!

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

Errare humanum est…

admin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:13:33 +0000

… which means we needed another development release (and another one will soon follow :). Therefor we just released AbiWord 2.7.7, which contains a bunch of cleanup work, and a totally revamped Mac OS X renderer based on our Linux Cairo+Pango renderer. The renderers actually share most of the code now, where they used to be two totally different renderer implementations.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

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 ]

AbiWord 2.7.5 Released!

admin — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:26:49 +0000

This is starting to get boring, as I’m turning the planets into freshmeat. But let’s just pretend we have some actual users that care about this news: there is another AbiWord release! With improved printing support (landscape printing actually works again, how 1992!), working copy/paste on Windows, and improved OpenDocument support, this seems like a very nice development release. We’re inching closed to 2.8.0 every day.

[ Release Notes | ChangeLog | Download ]

I have a release addiction

admin — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:40:02 +0000

Crashers and non-WYSIWYG behavior are so last week.