Re: What is GNOME office?

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On 17 Nov 2000, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

> 
> > (2) means Gnumeric, Abi & friends.
> 
> One thing needs to be said about Abi: Abi is as GNOME compliant as
> StarWord can be in the short term: they do not use GNOME libraries
> internally, they do not depend on it.
> 
> Abi is a cross platform project that has little to do with GNOME,
> except that they do have a "port" to GNOME.

Have you followed what we've been doing lately? We use gtk+ of course, as
well as libXML2.0 (as an option), gnomelibs, gnome-print and Gal. I hope
we can get bonobo soon. Dom tells me it won't be too hard and I certainly
want to help out.

> 
> On top of that, you have to factor in the fact that Abi is not really
> very robust.  Back in the early days of Helix, when we were looking
> toward creating an entire office suite, it was obvious that we would
> have to start a new word processing effort for GNOME, as Abi did not
> fit the requirements to go against an offering like Microsoft Word.

I can crash Starwriter more easily than Abi. I have a number of Word
Documents that Abi reads that crash SO. I remember a number of Gnumeric
versions that segfaulted quite easily. Gnumeric has got better, Abi has
got better. We don't claim to be at a stable release but the number of
crash bugs in our bug database that haven't been fixed is quite small.

Abi now has full CJK as well as non-Latin-1 support for Languages like
Russian. StarWriter after 10 years does not have cjk support.
Abi has Modeless dialogs. StarWriter does not.

We've got the fundamentals right to make a killer WP.

We will continue to evolve and improve. We have a fantastic international
community of developers with a firehose of a mailing list despite (or
maybe because of) having no full time developers at all.

Martin Sevior