AbiWord

Web Page: http://www.abisource.com/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2009

Mailing List: abiword-dev@abisource.com (subscription required, HTML rejected)

The AbiWord community consists of a highly skilled group of people interested in, as our tagline states, bringing Word Processing to Everyone. We do this for example by making our software, AbiWord being our flagship product, available on as many (operating) systems as possible, and adapting it for use on the One Laptop Per Child system.

Projects

• AbiWord with GetText; AbiText? This project would implement using gettext alone for localizations. This would have advantages to both developers and translators, would reduce redundancy, etc.
• Improving AbiWord’s OpenXML Support AbiWord is well known as one of the most useful open source word processing programs. It supports many word processing tasks to satisfy users’ needs. AbiWord is very powerful since it can easily be extended with plugins. For instance, OpenXML plugin has been very useful to many users since it allows importing and exporting Microsoft Office Word 2007 documents. However, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to improve AbiWord’s OpenXML support. In this application, I propose to improve OpenXML plugin to support a wide range of documents which can be imported and exported without any data loss.
• Port AbiWord for Windows to Unicode Abiword for Windows is an ANSI application, written mainly in C++. Porting Abiword for Windows completely to Unicode has been considered for a long time. Earlier researches were done to make it possible to build for both the ANSI and Unicode API. As the earlier versions of Microsoft have now become obsolete, this project targets the descendants of Windows NT and porting the existing ANSI application to a Unicode only build. The known bugs of the application are addressed in this project.
• Speeding up AbiWord's table layout algorithm AbiWord currently uses GTK+'s table layout algorithm, which works well for small tables. For larger tables, it is quite slow as it uses a quadratic algorithm. In this project I propose to investigate the table layout algorithms in Firefox and OpenOffice and implement a suitable one in AbiWord. This should speed up table performance considerably, as those applications are able to handle really large tables with high speed.