Ok, just for all to understand, here is the status and short term stuff I was
planning for KWord.

First of all I think the architecture of KWord has to be done correctly. The old
(HEAD) style of storing and rendering text is really bad, and is going to be 
replaced by the new QT classes of the QTRichText widgets.

Ok, I've been saying that for 3 months now, so why has this not happened yet??
Well, the QTRichText classes are development classes and part of the upcoming
QT3. I got the first version of the new widget somewhere in November last year,
and we tried to use them, this worked, but the widget was not advanced enough
yet for all the text rendering we need for a professional word processor. 

After some discussion and stuff with TT (thanx Reggie) the RichText classes
have been extended so in KWord we can extend (as in inheritance) the relevant
classes to implement the missing stuff in KWord.  (Which is really nice since
now we are not dependent on QT updates for KWord features ;)
The new problem is that the new BIDI and other stuff is created at a basic level
in QT (which is good), and there is lots of new stuff is in QPainter and friends.. 

This then boils down to the problem that we need QT3 to use the RichText engine.
And since KDE does not compile with the (still alpha) QT3....

So we are at a point of being unable to continue until the whole of KDE/koffice can
be compiled with QT3.
The alternative is to backport the classes, but this has to be done a number of times
until we reach a release of QT3/KDE.. (Which I am not going to invest time in ;)


Ok, I started this story with the statement that it is best to start with the basic
structure.. I still believe that, but if that is impossible, lets move on.

Here is a list of things I want to see in KWord in the short term, which do not
rely on the text-engine.

- complete redesign of GUI. (most wanted feature ;)
- images stuff needs to be completely redisigned (proposal in kword/TODO, I 
  remember werner or simon having an opinion on this as well)
- Extend the file format to make it possible to have styles in another file. 
  The styles are embedded into the xml that contains the text, I really want to
  be able to seperate that in either a new tar or in a seperate styles-template.xml file
  inside the same tar.

And smaller things;
- status bar should have extra things, like a page number..
- DCOP interface (well not that small, but it can be done in small steps)


How to proceed;

I believe that the branch was nice to get this development done, but brances only
work for short periods of time (my original estimate was 4 to 6 weeks).
So I think it is best to continue development in HEAD, and just forget the branch 
ever existed. 
Then when QT 3 is operational we just take the RICHTEXT branch as an example and 
implement RichText (yes, again)...

So, if anyone wants to jump in; do it in head, and try to spend as little time as
possible on the text-rendering stuff (I'll try to fix the annoying bugs soon, promise!)
And maybe we can continue development of the nice stuff soon!

Thanx for your time, and thanx for reading this far..

KWord has got potential, it needs a lot of work, but it is going to be the best 
WP ever ;)

-- 
Thomas Zander                                            zander@earthling.net
The only thing worse than failure is the fear of trying something new
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