Name:
Nicholas Sinlock
 
Email Address:
IsolatedIncident@Gmail.com
 
Freenode IRC Nick:
nsinlock
 
Location (City, Country and/or Time Zone):
Ellicott City, Maryland, U.S.A. (Eastern Standard Time)
 
Proposal Name:
KWord Plugins: (media)wiki markup translation, auto-correction, and source code colorization 

Motivation for Proposal / Goal:
	This collection of plugins will introduce new, useful functionality into the KWord application of KOffice. Wikias, especially media wiki's, are becoming more popular over time, yet KWord is unable to recognize or translate those markups into the native KWord format. Implementing this plugin will enable the conversion of wikia pages into printable text documents. But even beyond that, it will also create the necessary background code to work off of when implementing KWord to (media)wiki markup translation.
	Auto-correction in KWord 2.x is currently only partially implemented. Fully implementing this functionality will return KWord to the previous level of functionality enjoyed in 1.x. It will also allow for me to more easily implement the third plugin, the source code colorization plugin. KWord isn't necessarily the best choice for editing source code, but this plugin will be useful for users who want to compose documents which feature source code within their texts. The colorization allows for the source code to stand out within the document.
 

Implementation Details:
	All of these plugins will be extending the kotextplugin class, which will allow them to modify the text only after a modification has been made to a word or paragraph within the document.
	If possible I will use some existing code which converts (media)wiki to xml and modify it to convert the (media)wiki markup fully to the KWord standard. There are several options, including a python library, mwlib, which can parse mediawiki to a variety of formats. If I am unable to use any existing code, then I will have to write the specific code to parse and convert the (media)wiki markup into the KWord xml. The goal would be to run the plugin whenever a change is made to a paragraph, on that specific text. Either way, this would mean that when a person inserts a wikia page into KWord, the plugin will automatically translate those markups into markups understandable by KWord. Finally, since the plugin would only look at newly edited code, it could also react to a user typing in those markups, and shouldn't take up too many resources.
	The auto-correction plugin will be superficially similar to the above plugin. It will implement the features not yet implemented within KWord 2.x. Currently, that includes the ability to use list formatting for bulleted paragraphs and autonumbering for numbered paragraphs. I can most likely borrow part of this code from kdelibs and kwrite/kate or even some of the code from KOffice 1.x for any functionality previously implemented.
	 The source code colorization plugin should be the easiest as I can borrow code from the previous plugins, and from Kate/KWrite. Kate/KWrite currently offer source code colorization for a number of languages. I can use the code, found in kdelibs under Kate/Syntax, and either borrow that code or write up new code based upon that code. Under kdelibs, there are also the xml definitions used in the syntax/source code colorization. I can simply access those from kdelibs or create a separate copy within the plugin structure. The plugin will detect a change in the document, and then use the Kate/KWrite code to detect and color and source code input into the document. The plugin will have to be selectively turned on, however, since otherwise the plugin would have to check the change against all of the possible source code types. Kate seems to implement this intelligently either setting it based upon the file type, or allowing a user to select the code type to be checked against.

Tentative Timeline:
My goal would be to start on the (media)wiki plugin in first, as it seems to be the most difficult. I would expect to finish the plugin within several weeks. I would then work on the auto-correction plugin, then the source code colorization. Since these ideas can reuse code from the previous plugins, I would expect them to take progressively less time. By the half way point, I plan on being done with the (media)wiki plugin, and be in the process of coding the auto-correction plugin. I'm confident that all three plugins can be successfully implemented within the allotted time.
 

Do you have other obligations from late May to early August (school, work, etc.)?:
No.
 

About Me (let us know who you are!):
	I'm a freshman/sophmore Computer Science major in the University of Maryland: College Park(www.umd.edu and www.cs.umd.edu). I have experience programming in C++, Java, and Python. I've worked a little with both KDE and Qt, but I am still very new to Free Software. This would be my first major Free Software commit.    love KDE and KOffice, I run a KDE distro on both of my machines and am using KWord to write this document.(Not that this necessarily matters)