Re: Abiword embedding

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

> Martin,
>
> The guys here are reminding me to cover a couple more
> abi-as-report-platform questions:
>
> -- graphing.  Jody is creating gog, we were looking at using that
>    for the graphs.  Seeing how we currently embed graphs in html,
>    the question would be, 'will I be able to embed gog graphs in abi?'
>

Right now these can be exported to SVG format. We can import this into
abiword. Right now this turns the SVG into a bitmap. Pretty soon we will
keep this as an SVG in AbiWord and eventually we will be able to "edit"
it.

> -- embedability.  Currently, we embed gtkhtml as a sub-window in
>    various more complex windows.  Will I be able to embed abi?
>    That is, remove all abi menus, toolbars, (so that I have gnucash
>    toolbars showing instead).
>

Yes indeed. You can either link abiword and embed the abiwidget or you can
embed the abiword bonobo control. A week or so ago I posted a tar file
showing exactly how this is done. If you have AbiWord > 2.0 all you need
to do is type "make" in the tar file directory to build the example code
(it less than 100 LOC most of which builds the gtk framework).
It is very simple. Bonobo controls are easy to use.

> -- app swallowing.  One common complaint about acroread-in-mozilla
>    is that the acroread has its own way of dealing with mouse & keybd
>    events, which is different from how mozilla would handle them.
>    Thus, if I embed abi, I'd also want to turn off key/mouse
>    processing, so that I can continue to use the gnucash conventions.
>

Well AbiWord has it's own keybindings. You can edit a document in that
AbiControl just like a normal AbiWord session. (Play with the example code
to see.) If you move your mouse out of the AbiWidget what-ever keybinding
you used to use will come into effect. If you like I believe we will be
able to make AbiWord ignore all events on it and instead pass them up to
the containing widget but them you'll lose the ability to edit the
document.

> -- The documents that are marked up with named text blocks, as we've
>    been discussing,  clearly these can be saved to disk ... but
>    can they be exported to other formats (without loosing the markup)?

Frankly I don't know if other document formats have the sort of
sophisticated controls to allow external processing we're about to give
AbiWord. I don't know if they'll be preserved.
However all the markups you tell AbiWord to make to documents eg. Make
this text bold, Underline here, Hide this text, add these rows of text,
etc.. all this will be preserved on export.

>    How about importing?  I'm not sure how to ask this question correctly;
>    becasue I'm not sure quite what it is ...  for example, one of the
>    guys here (jsled) wants to use xml (with named text block markup),
>    use xslt to transform it into the abi document, then do the text
>    insertion as we discussed.

Yes we can do this. We have a nice importer framework so that we could
either import it directly or I guess xslt it into the AbiWord XML file
format. However no one has done this second thing yet and we have nice
structures in place for importing XML-based file formats. In either case
we'll need help from the GNU-cash team to get it right.
>
>    I guess the question is: "we may want to play games with the report
>    templates, what sort of games can we play?"
>

Whatever you like. Get your users to design their own too :-)

Cheers

Martin