Live data from Hacker News

Modernizing AbiWord code

figuiere.net

21–30 of 62 posts

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#21

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

Worth mentioning Gnumeric, a nice and clean spreadsheet counterpart to AbiWord.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#22
post #20

I wonder how clang-tidy [1] could help in this task [1] http://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/

It helps okay. I recently used it to slowly and mostly automatically introduce more and more C++11 across a bigger code base. For example it does a great job introducing nullptr [0] and an okay job turning classic for loops into range based for loops [1] where possible.

[0] https://github.com/swift/swift/commit/eddd92ed76ae68cb1e2026... [1] https://github.com/swift/swift/commit/3c560e31b0f168da917e8d...

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#23
I liked AbiWord. It was very lean and GTK+ friendly. But I always had little gotchas with the formatting and problems with ODF occurring between word processors that didn't occur as often when originating from LibreOffice. It had the clean/snappy interface that LibreOffice should have had, but definitely not the document feature support it needed.

These days, I'm not sure why anyone would bother trying to revive AbiWord. Not that I don't have my fair share of software engineering projects that are specific to my interests, but I personally wouldn't go back to using it or LibreOffice. If I really need a full-blown word processor, Google Docs does everything I need, and their Chrome app works for offline use. Most of the time, I can get away with writing stuff in Markdown. Then again, I'm a developer so that appeals to me. Microsoft Word online also works well cross-platform. With either one, you may not get the best multi-format support, but they're both very dependable IMO. I couldn't depend on AbiWord most of the time unless I knew the same doc would be opened in another AbiWord instance.

Web-based technology really is, I think, the best way forward in cross-platform development for things like word processing which are not CPU intensive. People can and should use whatever tools they want to get the job done but, if I was to start a new Linux/CP word processor today, I'd be using Node.js with Babel and make it "Web Native". For some things you'll want C++ but, for me, not this. But best of luck to them for sure.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#24
post #21

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

Worth mentioning Gnumeric, a nice and clean spreadsheet counterpart to AbiWord.

Both part of "Gnome Office" along with a few other applications as native GTK+ office applications. Though I guess it's probably be more of a collection than a well connected suite like MS Office, LibreOffice or even whatever KOffice is called these days.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth mentioning Gnumeric, a nice and clean spreadsheet counterpart to AbiWord.

Both part of "Gnome Office" along with a few other applications as native GTK+ office applications. Though I guess it's probably be more of a collection than a well connected suite like MS Office, LibreOffice or even whatever KOffice is called these days.

The GNOME project decided not to be serious with GNOME Office years and years ago.

Imagine if they had put their effort into it though? Almost certainly they would have been at the forefront of desktop options and a good likelihood as a candidate for corporations.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#27

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

I used it back when OpenOffice was just too slow and bloated to use very well on most computers I owned ~10 years ago and earlier. But through a combination of improved OpenOffice/LibreOffice performance and faster computers, I finally drifted away from AbiWord. For one, I still had to install OpenOffice for PowerPoint type work, so it was there anyway and it usually kept up with MS format compatibility better than A…

They were, under the go-oo.org push.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#28
post #5

I really loved AbiWord in the early 2000s. However, the fact that they refused to default to ODF meant I switched away. Who's going to store important documents in a format that only AbiWord can read. Still though, it's got many advantages over the LibreOffice bloat.

It is not "refused". It is just not a trivial undertaking and with even more limited resources now, it is even less easy.

Just switching to ODF as a default format wouldn't have been a good idea, the difference in data models would have caused problems. I have in mind that to do that we'd have to change the internal model for things like list and tables to not have to convert them back and forth each time with losses.

This is a sad fact of the reality.

BTW one of the glorious hackers from the "LibreOffice side" has implemented a LibroOffice filter to read AbiWord documents.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#29
post #11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lot of folks I tried to convert to abiword refused because it didn't default to .doc for saved files.

Always liked using Abiword on Linux, but the Windows version seemed quite buggy last time I tried it. IIRC Abiword could read and write in (some) .doc format, though that was not the default native format. Come to think of it, a decade or so ago, access to .doc files was a major reason to use Abiword on non-Windows platforms. It will be good to see it working again.

It can read .doc. Never write. When it writes .doc it is actually writing RTF. A kludge, but this is better than always explaining users that saving as .rtf will be fine. And Word did that for a while part of a feature that was removed in an update. The only things were this didn't work is for some proprietary CMS that supported .doc but not .rtf.

I'm personally not super happy about that, but it is still much better than not doing it.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#30
post #4

Uh, Eyeball Mark II? Where do I get my upgrade...

Probably had laser eye surgery. Doesn't seem like he uses glasses.

nope. Never had eye surgery and I have normal vision without glasses.

It was just a nod a reading stuff with a second set of eyes (ie code I didn't write).

Post reply on HN