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Originally Published: Friday, 4 February 2000 Author: John Gowin
Published to: news_enhance_desktops/zzzz Page: 1/1 - [Std View]

AbiWord 0.7.8 is out

Although many members of the AbiWord community will be at LinuxWorld in New York this week, the development team won't have an official presence at this show. (Sorry -- no booth, no Abi, no T-Shirts.) To make up for this, we've pulled together a sweet release for you that's chock full of goodies. (from the Abisource-Anounce list)

Although many members of the AbiWord community will be at LinuxWorld in New York this week, the development team won't have an official presence at this show. (Sorry -- no booth, no Abi, no T-Shirts.) To make up for this, we've pulled together a sweet release for you that's chock full of goodies.

Those of you who like to download the sources and build it yourself will need to grab an extra library, libiconv. Updated build instructions can be found, as always, at:

http://www.abisource.com/dev_build.phtml

Selected highlights since 0.7.7 include:

1. True WYSIWYG. Previously, we had subtle reformatting discrepancies when changing resolutions (such as printing and zooming). Bruce Pearson has done the dirty work to take care of that, provided that scalable fonts are available. Thus, on Win32 only TrueType fonts are selected when creating fonts. Fixes #319, 362, 374, 524, 552.

2. No more character dirt. Bruce also nuked the infamous bug #7, which has perplexed and annoyed folks for well over a year now. Not any more. :-)

3. Overline support. You may not use this feature, but physicists like Martin Sevior can't live without it. :-) While he was in there, he also added support for variable width under/over/strike lines, so they'd look appropriate at various scale factors. Fixes #234.

4. Minor display glitches. Bruce and Henrik collaborated to fix a bunch of problems, including #375, 583, 588, and 714.

5. Insert Date and Time. A mighty handy dialog, courtesy of Alexey Sinutin .

6. Page-level navigation. Added keybindings for Ctrl-PageUp/PageDown (move to top of previous/next page) and Alt-Ctrl-PageUp/PageDown (move to beginning/end of this page).

7. Better support for non-English content. While the AbiWord interface has been translated to over a dozen languages already, the actual content handling was far too English-centric. For this release, Henrik Berg has been focusing on expanding our support for 8-bit languages. Among other things, he's gotten ispell dictionaries fully working for those character sets, by means of Bruno Haible's libiconv library. In addition, he's turned on Win32 keyboard support for 8-bit character sets. Fixes #556.

8. Translations. New translations for Indonesian -- a tag team effort by Tim & Rita Allen with help from I Made Wiryana -- plus Swedish, courtesy of Henrik Berg . In addition, the following translations have been updated:

Danish Birger Langkjer Finnish Jarmo Karvonen French Italian Marco Innocenti Norwegian Kjartan Maraas Spanish

Also, based a suggestion from Henrik, there's now code to allow us to try to fall back to a 'default' translation for a particular language before falling-back to EnUS.

9. LaTeX exporter. Created by Joaquin Cuenca Abela cuenca@ie2.u-psud.fr>.

10. Word importer. Justin and Caolan have fixed things so that tabstops, breaks, unicode conversion, page break before, widow/orphan control are all imported successfully now. Fixes #630-632, 634, 684.

11. RTF importer. Now handles negative values for margin-left and text-indent, courtesy of Malcolm Peacock . Fixes the following POW:

http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/November/0074.html

12. Minor file format change. To make it easier to properly recognize AbiWord documents, we moved the tag up to the top of the file, preceded by the appropriate XML declaration. This should not break compatibility for anyone, and will automatically be fixed the next time you save your AbiWord files. If you encounter any problems with this, definitely let us know.

13. Error propagation. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt rewired a bunch of file-handling logic to propagate useful error messages out to the user. Fixes #343, 563, 626, 665, 682, and 683. He also squashed a bunch of compiler warnings. What a guy!

14. Windows stuff. Bruce Pearson turned on mouse wheel support (#655, 696). Henrik Berg added logic to automatically detect and default to the appropriate language and ruler units. This feature can be overridden by the system.profile or in a user's preferences. He also added the old-style Windows shift/ctrl-ins/del keybindings for cut, copy, and paste.

15. Unix stuff. By popular request, libstdc++ is no longer required. (We never really needed it anyhow.) PostScript emissions now use signed characters, as suggested by Bob Monaghan . With the latest fonts.dir, Symbol fonts should print properly now, too. Finally, Birger Langkjer provided a bunch of RPM fixes for GNOME desktop integration (#699).

16. BeOS stuff. There were no significant BeOS-specific changes in this release, although most of the new cross-platform (XP) features should Just Work. If you'd like to help keep the BeOS port completely up to date, contact us via abiword-dev@abisource.com.

17. Other platforms. Avid watchers of the AbiWord sources will note that there's been progress made on MacOS and QNX/Photon ports. However, there's no ETA on binaries yet. Please don't send us mail saying you want them. We know that. Instead, send us help, money, etc.

Enjoy!



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