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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: KWord status
From:       David Faure <david () mandrakesoft ! com>
Date:       2001-02-09 11:04:22
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On Friday 09 February 2001 08:27, Thomas Zander wrote:
> [...]
> 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 ;)

Hmm, and I was starting with another alternative... Rebuilding KWord around the current
QTextEdit (and accepting its limitations for now :), so that when Qt 3 is out, only
the final integration needs to be done. This is assuming that the QTextEdit doesn't
change too much between the one we have and the final one - I'm not sure
this assumption stands, though.

> 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.

Can't be a new tar. People move a file from a computer to another one and they
expect stuff to work the same there. Of course what we could do is a 
"Save Template" that creates a new template for the template dialog, like 
KPresenter does.

> And smaller things;
> - status bar should have extra things, like a page number..
Yeah, I should have a look at that.
> - DCOP interface (well not that small, but it can be done in small steps)
Later, when the new design is in place ;-)

> 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. 
Hmmm. Well, I'll happily do as you say since I'm just starting on KWord, but...
:(
I always hate this kind of situation, where we have to work on short-term
issues because we can't tackle the long-term solution yet.
This means, we know that some of the stuff we do will have to be dropped
for sure later on :(

> 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!)

Well, this excludes that "save a template" idea for now...

> And maybe we can continue development of the nice stuff soon!

Hmm, ok. Then I shall start with the statusbar stuff, it will help all KOffice
apps.

-- 
David FAURE, david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
http://perso.mandrakesoft.com/~david/, http://www.konqueror.org/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today
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