Re: Hello?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

Please dont mail more than one list at a time.  It makes conversations
very difficult to follow and it make for a lot of needless repitition.

The various programs that want to be part of Gnome Office have their own
mailing lists so there is only traffic on this list when there are
integration and distribution issues to be discussed.  Gnome Office is
alive and well and the developers of Gnumeric Abiword and Libgda plan to
continue to synchronise major releases as best as they can and work on
various integration issues as they come up.   See the archives for more
information.  http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-office-list

> Me and a uni friend were thinking about writing a PowerPoint clone for
> Gnome.  Do you think this is a good idea?

It depends.
What do you want to achieve?
And do you have a clear plan on how to achieve it?

Writing a true and full PowerPoint clone (not just another slidshow
application) is far more complicated than you might think, and is at least
as complicated as writing Abiword because you willl need a complex piece
table to manage all the pieces and have a properly structured document.
(There was a project called Agnubis that didn't get off the ground, there
was another before that but the name escapes me).  There were recent
suggestions about creating a slideshow program based on the AbiSource
framework (the name Criawips and AbiShow floated around for a while) but
so far nothing has come of it.  Abiword can and has been used to give
presentations and the Abiword developers have recently added Text Frames
(to the developement version in CVS) and plan to improve support for
embedding vector graphics.

The Inkscape developers have an interest in Animation and Multipage
documents and they have a viewer program for InkView which some people
expressed an interest in using for slideshows (SVG wrapped in SMIL).
(Taking the canvas and generalising it so that it can be reused by other
Gnome/GTK applications is already planned for Inkscape).

There are probably plenty of other ways to go about this but I think you
best best would be to create an experimental branch of an existing project
rather than trying to start from scratch.

If you plan on supporting the Microsoft PowerPoint file format your task
will be exponentially more complicated, there is even less documentation
and existing code on it than the Microsoft Word document format (although
if you can read German the code and comments in OpenOffice would be very
useful).

Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

"Power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely."