Re: ambitions of Abi-word

On Sun, 20 Nov 2005, Custodis wrote:

> Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 08:10:00 +0100
> From: Custodis <Custodis@zonnet.nl>
> Cc: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Subject: Re: ambitions of Abi-word
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> I would like to add:

Keep in mind some or all of these feature might never happen, but when
Martin expresses intrest in a feature he probably intends working towards
it himself.

> 15. Scripting with good handlers and user forms

scripting is something which I suppose has always been planned but always
deferred as a very long term goal.

> 16. Mail merge with Gnumeric

I strongly encourage you to try using Abiword Gnumeric and the GDA plugin
on Linux for a much better and more integrated experience. This existence
of this clean method means there is not as much incentive to make things
work directly between Gnumeric and Abiword but it might still happen

> and a good user interfase to filter data from a specific map in Gnumeric

Good interface can be very subjective but also if you are willing to
make an effort you can make things clearer by creating a bug
report, providing detailed descriptions including screenshots mockups and
whatever else is needed. At least that way if a developer is interested
in implementing the feature they do not have to do quite so much guesswork
figuring out what is needed.

> 17. Past data from Gnumeric into Abi and past links to a specific cell
> into Abi

There have been improvements to cut and paste of tables from Gnumeric to
abiword and if you make very specific requests there is better chance of
developers making those incremental improvements.

I'm not sure what the current state of embedding Gnumeric documents
directly in abiword is so the sistuation may be better than you realise.

> 18. Better support for large documents

This is very vague and hard to pin down but Martin has already mentioned
there are plans to improve various things which should contribute to this
end result.

> 19. User interfase for changing the default document format

I want to go on record strongly against this but I expect no one would
want to implement it anyway. We do not want people to do this, we need to
make sure people understand the implications of what they are doing if
they decided to change the default format. Requiring users be
knowledgeble enough to edit a configuration file themselves is in effect a
safety measure, putting a potentially dangerous feature out of harms way
(data loss is a serious risk).

> 20. Encrypting documents

What do you have in mind? This is an interesting problem because there is
strong cryptographic encrypition which is best done by using PGP to
encrypt the whole document when it is finished. Then there are simple
insecure methods for marking documents as read only but these can always
be bypassed (any cryptography can be bypassed if you have enough time and
resources) so we need to undo the perception this is actual "security"
as opposed to a recommendation from the author.

I'd be fairly surprised if there wasn't already a bug report requesting
something similar for most of what you have mentioned.

- Alan

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Received on Sun Nov 20 15:58:40 2005