Re: Hello?

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

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 20:43, Colin JN Breame wrote:
> I havent seen much traffic through this list - is gnome office still
> alive?
> 
> Me and a uni friend were thinking about writing a PowerPoint clone for
> Gnome.  Do you think this is a good idea?
> 

Well we certainly need one. I believe there is Power Point parser in the
cvs version of gnumeric somewhere.

I think that if you married this to an extended version of abiword you
could get something useful in a reasonable timeframe.

I've long held the idea of that AbiWord has the framework and a large
fraction of the code needed to make a decent Presentation Program. I'd
be happy to give you advice on how to do this.

We've watched several attempts to make presentation programs die because
the authors did not understand the problems involved and thought they
could short cut the process by concentrating on the canvas or animations
or some other fancy part of the problem without getting the core right.

So my advice is...

1. You need a genuine Model-View-Controller paradim or you have no hope.
This means you must have a good document model like a AbiWord's
piecetable.

2. You need a genuine rich text, multi-view editor like AbiWord or you
have no hope.

3. You need to able to invest a minimum of 2 solid man-years plus have
numerous helpers and leverage as much as possible from what is already
written to have any hope.

Good Luck!

Martin


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