Re: short minute of meeting at guadec

[=?unknown-8bit?q?Caol=E1n?= McNamara <Caolan McNamara sun com>]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2002 at 11:03:00AM -0400, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 12:26:43AM +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > one of the best things we should start doing is to move the different
> > filters for file formats to a libgnomeoffice.
> That is ambituous.
> Very ambitious.
> Moving the framework to manage such filters into a gnome-office lib
> seems like a definite win.  That along with the plugin framework
> that supports it are quite general.  However, the filters themselves
> will likely require access to some of the individual application
> data structures and apis that are not general.
> 
> In an ideal world if abiword can be convinced to use a pango/gtk
> based canvas xp for document display (you'd keep the native widgets
> for dialogs, menus etc) then we would aim to have the escher drawing
> layer use that and we'd all win.

Surely in an ideal world converters like a escher filter and/or the other
filters and the display engines for those filters would be seperate, to convert
the original formats into an open intermediate format and leave the
rendering/drawing part of them as a seperate task to a different library and
implemented once for the intermediate format. Not doing that seperation placed
OOo into its current situation where our legacy filters need OOo running to
operate, and noone else can use them without significant reengineering.