Re: Gnome Office summary from the Gnome Summit.

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

On Thu, 2002-07-25 at 02:57, Martin Sevior wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>          Here are my notes fromt the Gnome Office session of the Gnome
> summit in plain text form. Since many of the people involved in these
> projects could not make it to the summit I thought it was important
> to write everything up. I think the the number one thing Gnome Office
> needs right now is a person committed to working and advocating
> integration between the various projects.
>
> Now that the Gnome 2 platform has been delivered maybe some people who
> have been concentrating on "platform issues" might like to look at these
> "integration issues". We came up with many ideas of how we can do better
> than the competition by integrating these large applications right into
> the desktop environment.

Bill Haneman wrote:
---------------------
Though I am very supportive of gnumeric and abiword, and should say up
front that I was, regrettably, unable to attend the GNOME-Office talk
due to a schedule conflict, I am a bit sorry to see almost no mention of
OpenOffice.org in these minutes.
-----------------------------------------

Hi Bill,
	The AbiWord project is supportive of OO too. We even donated our
cross platform spell checking code to OO.

------------------------------------------

OO.o is at the moment the biggest single free-software office suite
available, and arguably the most complete; as such it is very relevant
to the goal of a "top notch office productivity package" integrated in
to the GNOME desktop.
-------------------------------------------------------

OO is certainly the most complete and has awesome MS filters. The
AbiWord team may well steal some of the OO filter code when the
time comes. Now that we've got xft and fontconfig working, we will
probabally borrow the OO fonts which have been tailored to match MS
Office. Maybe we'll include them in a downloadable font pack.

Regarding the lack the of talk of OO, what can I say? No one from OO
showed up. That project has a budget of millions of dollars and generates
real revenue. It has a mailing list in the thousands I hear. The people
at the Gnome Office part of the summit all found ways to attend with
considerablly smaller resources funded from their own pockets.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course there have been grumblings about the non-gtk-centered toolkit
in OO.o, but that's partly legacy and partly a response to the need for
a cross-platform solution (though of gtk+ is available on Win32 now).
But certainly choice is good, and I hope that whatever
integration/interop work takes place for GNOME Office continues to
target OOo as a key component.  Certainly OOo itself is making progress
towards better GNOME integration with things like its theming and
upcoming accessibility support.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Can we get a clear statement about this? Will OO move to GTK 2 on unix?

One area where I can see a real possibility of geneuine collaboration is
Pango. In particular the Windows port of Pango and printing with Pango.

AbiWord aims to support all the World's languages and after a considerable
debate, the AbiWord team decided to target Pango as the means of providing
this support. However the people leading this effort (Tomas Frydich and
Andrew Dunbar) are primarily Windows developers and progress on the
Pango-ization of AbiWord has been rather hindered by the Pango's weak
support for Windows.

Does OO have a similar goal to support all the World's Languages? Are they
interested in using Pango to achieve this? Pango could really use some
help in both Windows and Printing.

Regarding integration with the Gnome desktop, it appears OO suffers a
similar problem to the other Gnome Office applications. We all have *lots*
of work to do inside our own applications, we really need new people to
work on these integration issues. The email and notes I wrote was an
attempt move this process along.

Finally a really obvious point where we definately need to cooperate is
the data format to the X-clipboard. We should be able to copy and paste
and well as drag and drop between applications. Larry Ewing promised to
write something about this and post it to freedesktop.org. Hopefully we
can all agree on this.

Cheers

Martin