Interesting comments on Footnotes

[Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>]

There was: "Is it planned to add intra-cell formatting ? 
E.g. writting two words in a cell, the first one Bold and the second one
underlined."

Followed by: "The intra-cell formatting mentioned above is big. The
other big layout feature is text orientation. Spreadsheets are not
always just funtional things. They are frequently used to lay out data
in a way that is presentable and attractive. These layout features are
important and I hope they get resolved soon. I use excel every day using
these formatting features so for now I just can't use gnumeric. (even
though it is so tantalizingly close!)"

I apologise in advance for anything stupid I'm about to say; my overall
knowledge of Gnome/Abiword/Gnumeric architecture is not something I'm
overly proud of.

Is there no way in which Gnumeric might be incorporating some of, or all
of, the text layout functionality from Abiword?

Text cells could be like mini Abi docs or like cells in an Abi table. 
Since Abiword has text layout and formatting down to a fine art, it
would surely be a waste as well as inferior for Gnumeric to be running
it's own text engine.

Surely this is the kind of collaboration that could see Gnome Office
start to succeed.  Parts of the applications could lend themselves to
being libraries or bonobo (?) components.  That way, document parts
would be almost interchangable - spreadsheets nested in Abiword,
advanced test nested in Gnumeric.

That last point also raises another issue; surely we should be
advocating the right tools for the right job.  If something requires
advanced text layout, then surely it should be a ('scuse the poor term)
word document and not a spreadsheet.

Perhaps we should be aiming for a higher utopia with Gnome Office. 
Documents maybe should be considered a generic top level container of
all types of content; word processing, spreadsheets, graphing, graphics
and even multimedia.  Abiword, Gnumeric, Abishow (?), and others should
be more content providers for an overall architecture rather than
standalone applications.

Holy moley that was a bit pie in the sky.  Still, it would be cool to
define some kind of utopia for Gnome Office and try and steer things in
the right direction.

- Charlie
-- 
Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>
XWT Foundation - www.xwt.org