Re: Gnome Office summary from the Gnome Summit.

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 01:57, Martin Sevior wrote:
[snip]

I (Bill) wrote:
 
> 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.
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
and Martin wrote:

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

First of all I should explicitly say that I am not on the OOo team, and
can't speak for them.  But I will give my current understanding:

I think that's very very unlikely.  The technical reasons for not moving
to GTK2 widgets are actually pretty sound.  If OOo/StarOffice were
starting fresh today I think gtk2 would be the logical UI component set,
but having built on cross-platform VCL, and given the enormous existing
codebase, I think that not only would a port be an enormous effort, it
would be effort that could better be spent to everyone's advantage
(including GNOME's) doing bugfixes, better filters, and other types of
integration.

That said, my understanding is that OOo should respect gtk+ themes and
various GNOME settings in future releases, and will integrate with te
GNOME accessibility infrastructure and ABIs.
 
> 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.

Pango integration seems more likely to be a plus, and offhand I would
think that some kind of pango integration with VCL and SO/OOo's existing
text support would make sense.  In that case of course it would be a win
for GNOME and Pango as well, not only in terms of sharing the work on
Pango among a larger base but also in terms of consistency for users. 
But I cannot say whether this possibility has been raised with OOo or
not, perhaps it's time to send this discussion to their mailing list(s)?
 
> 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.

I agree with what you say here and in the next paragraph.  From an
outsider's perspective I would think that a bonoboui wrapper would make
a lot of sense as well.

As for resourcing, though StarOffice is now in principle generating some
revenue and has engineering resources, it and its alter-ego
OpenOffice.org are not exactly wallowing in resources; they are feeling
the pinch with the rest of us, and thus must make tough prioritization
decisions on those fronts.

best regards,

Bill
 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
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