--- F J Franklin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 20 Oct 2002, David Chart wrote: > > You know I said I was keeping things in CVS? This > > is why. > > > > Abi seems to be using Frank's new phtml exporter > > whenever you ask it to save a .abw document, even > > if you just press the Save button on the toolbar. > > The export mechanism is supplying ieft=11 for some > reason, though it's importing ieft=1; not sure > whether it's something I did or not. I'll be looking > into changing the current ieft mechanism anyway > since it seems rather dangerous with respect to > plugins.
Just a rundown on the problems with AbiWord's filetype (ieft) concept, what's wrong with it, and what would be better: AbiWord doesn't have one filetype, it has two. One for importers and one for exporters. These are numbers assigned as the import/export modules are loaded. Since it is not a requirement to create both an importer and an exporter, these numbers usually are not the same for the two filetypes. When saving a file which has previously been loaded or when loading after a file has been saved, we attempt to synchronize the two filetypes. Originally we did this by looking for an importer or exporter which supports the same file extension as the filetype we last used. This was found to break down with the Plain Text, Human-Readable Text, and Encoded Text filetypes since they all support the same extension. I recently changed the synch logic to look for the importer/exporter with the identical file description field. My testing showed that it fixed the known problems but as this was not the function of the description field it's likely to fail in some situations. If an importer and exporter have slightly different descriptions (by typo or be design), the filetypes will not synch. If no matching filetype is found, we should fallback to .abw. A better system would replace the numeric filetype with an ASCII string ID specifically designed to be passed around as a filetype and to be checkable to synchronize importers and exporters. I'm not sure what the best procedure would be in the case of 2 modules providing the same ID. Maybe that's an error or maybe there could be a valid reason for it?? It might also be beneficial for an import/export module to be able to specify which filetype to use as its opposite in the case where only import or export is provided. For instance, the "RTF for old apps" module could recommend "RTF" as its opposite. Any ideas or suggestions? Andrew Dunbar. > Ciao, Frank > > Francis James Franklin > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > `Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, > Copper, Jet, Diamond, > Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. > `Sapphire and Steel have been assigned...' > ===== http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
