At 12:55 AM 2/2/02 +1100, Martin Sevior wrote: >On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, F J Franklin wrote: >> As I mentioned on IRC yesterday, I'd like to start work on "AbiDraw" (?) >> while I work on SVG rendering. > >SourceGear owns the trademark to "AbiShow" I don't know quite this means >in the long run.
Yes, that's worth keeping in mind. Still, if we have a criticial mass of developers interested in starting work on a presentation graphics product once AbiWord 1.0 ships, I'm confident that any trademark issues can be worked out. While I'm unlikely to have time to do such development myself, I'd *love* to help get such a group up and running. Let me know. >> Also, I know little about GUI stuff, so if anyone feels like whipping up >> an interface, that would make my life a lot easier :-) > >I've got to know powerpoint pretty well. It is pretty easy to use so as a >starting point you could just copy how powerpoint down things. > >At a minimum though you need to implement floating frames. This is >actually a lot easier in preentation graphics than a word processor and >there is no need to flow text into and out of these things. Each floating >frame is self contained. Yes, these are *excellent* suggestions for getting a start on a presentation graphics package. Couldn't have said it much better myself. In addition, someone on the AbiShow team will need to investigate transparency and background issues in the src/text/* component. For AbiWord, we currently assume that we can cheaply erase the background during editing, which isn't likely to be the case in a PG package. >One way to do this would be to have a different piecetable per frame >and make each slide a vector of frames. Yep. However, some thought will need to go into how infinite undo will work here, since that feature would need to be synchronized across multiple piece tables (and SVG data structures). Currently, the AbiWord code delegates all that work to a single piece table. Paul motto -- keep that AbiSuite torch lit
