At 07:13 PM 8/30/01 +0400, Dmitriy Kostiuk wrote:
>Hello All,
>
>      I have both Linux (static) and Windows versions 
>of Abi 0.9.2.
>      And it was just noticed that they produce 
>Cyrillic documents in
>      different encoding. Linux version saves KOI8-R - 
>the most
>      widely spread one for *nix systems - and that's 
>OK. But Windows
>      version saves Russian words in some fantastic 
>encoding which is
>      recognized by nothing but Win-Abi itself.
>
>      The worst thing is that .abw document saved 
>under Windows is
>      unreadable under Linux and vice versa.
>
>      Some inner voice says to me that such situation 
>is not normal :)
>      and that there is some faultness in one of my 
>systems.
>
>
>      Am I right?

Dmitriy, 

Thanks for raising this issue.  

One of our design goals is that anyone *should* be able to move AbiWord 
documents between platforms seamlessly.  If not, please file a bug in 
Bugzilla with a detailed description of the problems you're seeing 
(including test documents).  

I'm not an expert on our encoding support, but I believe that we had to 
choose between two approaches:

  1. store in platform-specific "plain text" encoding 
  2. store in a single cross-platform (XP) encoding, such as Unicode 

The advantage of #1 is that it makes it easier to edit our documents on that 
platform using other text editors (which often have horrible encoding 
support).  The advantage of #2 is that it maximizes the chances that our 
documents will be portable across platforms.  

If you'd like to discuss how to make #1 or #2 work better, feel free to ask 
over on the abiword-dev list, where the folks who *are* experts on this 
(Tomas Frydrych, Andrew Dunbar, Vlad Harchev, et al) will give you much 
better answers. 

One other wrinkle here is that some fonts are mis-encoded using the "wrong" 
encoding (ie, 8859-2 glyphs are labelled using 8859-1 codepoints), and 
earlier versions of AbiWord didn't detect and deal with such problems 
appropriately.  This may still be a problem, so again, please ask over on 
abiword-dev.  

bottom line
-----------
A cross-platform (XP) word processor doesn't Just Work if the documents it 
produces get garbled when switching platforms.  

Thanks,
Paul

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