[no subject]

Abi's layout features are pretty darn good, but I think that it's probably 
overkill for the problem at hand and probably harder to get off the ground 
than something based around Pango.

Specifically, text orientation is something that's supposed to happen in the 
next major Pango release.

Finally, both Abi and Gnumeric are capable of embedding themselves inside of 
other applications via bonobo. At the moment, neither is capable of being a 
embeddable container. Also, there is no well-defined "GnomeOffice Interface" 
that these components adhere to. I'd like that to change. Maybe you can help 
that happen.

Best regards,
Dom

>From: Charles Goodwin <charlie xwt org>
>To: gnome-office-list gnome org
>Subject: Interesting comments on Footnotes
>Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 22:53:04 +0000
>
>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
>
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>gnome-office-list gnome org
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