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List:       abiword-dev
Subject:    Re: the future of OpenDocument in Abiword?
From:       Daniel d'Andrada Tenório de Carvalho <daniel.carvalh
Date:       2006-08-04 17:00:15
Message-ID: 44D37D1F.60800 () indt ! org ! br
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Hi guys!


ext Dominic Lachowicz wrote:
>
> Hi Sander,
>
> On 8/3/06, Sander van Loon <svloon@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>
>> I have brought this up before, and the answer was that because
>> OpenDocument didn't play nice with Abiword's internals (or something
>> like that, dunno what it was exactly anymore?) it was decided against
>> using it as the default format.
>>
>> But will it remain like this in the future? We all think sane defaults
>> are important, don't we? Yet still the abw format is the default, which
>> is solely used by Abiword while OpenDocument is gaining more and more
>> popularity.
>>
>> In the release notes of Abiword 2.4.5 it is mentioned that a massive
>> amount of bugs in the OpenDocument import and export filters were fixed.
>> When will the OpenDocument import and export filters have matured enough
>> to justify using OpenDocument as the default format?
>
> While there have been a lot of improvements lately, given our level of
> support for the format, I believe that there is still the possibility
> of dataloss when using OpenDocument. Sum1 or DanD would be able to
> address that better than I could.
> [...]

Yeah, the OpenDocument plugin undertakes a massive struggle trying to 
translate from Abi paradigm to OpenDocument.
The two formats handles some document concepts very differently to the 
point that in some cases only a terribly ugly, unmaintainable, hack 
could do a lossless translation, which I chose not to do.

The only way to make a reliable, lossless and hack free import/export to 
OpenDocument would be to modify the implementation of some parts of 
AbiWord itself. e.g.: like changing the implementation of lists. 
Needless to say that this is a rather intrusive and costly approach 
(leaving aside the argument of whether those changes would really be 
improvements or not).

On the other hand, the .abi XML file format really needs some love. :-)

Best Regards,
Daniel d'Andrada T. de Carvalho - INdT
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