Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)

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

On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: 25 Oct 2000 15:46:27 -0400
> From: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>
> Reply-To: gnome-office-list gnome org
> To: gnome-office-list gnome org
> Cc: Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>, dev openoffice org,
>      abiword-dev abisource com, guppi-list gnome org, gnumeric-list gnome org
> Subject: GNOME Office and OpenOffice
> 
> 
> So, I hope to see posts from hackers at Sun, AbiWord, and any other
> interested groups in the near future, outlining their design goals for
> an office project and how they'd move toward them; maybe distinguish
> your "must have" goals from your "could compromise on this" goals.
> Explain how you would go about creating a single project from the
> current chunks of code - would you entirely abandon one codebase, or
> how would you merge them? What rationale would you give for that? What
> kind of stuff can be done to integrate all the office suite
> communities into one development team? See what the current issues
> are, and then we can see if they're resolvable.

Abi will not be a solely Gnome application until Gnome runs on at least
Windows, BeOS, QNX and Mac. My personal opinion is that Abi should
concentrate on core WP capabilities in its XP framework and pull in other
components as needed via a component interface. I'm happy that this
interface is Bonobo since it is by far the leading network aware
component architecture.

What do I want in Abi Post 1.0? Frames, sophisticated text flow, and
Tables. I personally have ideas on how we (abi) can do this but I think we
should also investigate other code bases to see what they do too.

One feature that I don't currently know how to do is sophisticated
backdrops for a document.

What do I think should be components? Spreadsheets, charts, Vector
Graphics, Bitmap graphics - maybe equations.

Equations are such a useful part of a WP that we may have to fork whatever
equation editor is used by Gnome and put it into our XP framework.

Anyway, enough politics for me for now. I want to fix some bugs and
implement some features :-)

Martin