Re: GNOME Office list, and Sun/AbiWord

["Dom Lachowicz" <cinamod hotmail com>]

Havoc said:
>I don't know what the end goal for the AbiWord hackers is.
To provide a free (speech&beer) word processor which is feature 
compatible/equivalent/superior with the better products out there, such as 
MSWord, WordPerfect, etc... We also are committed to making this product 
truly XP and friendly to the user. No using GTK on windows. You have to use 
MFC there. Catch the idea?

>I'm not interested in an office suite that's "pretty good for a
>free one", or a "small, fast but feature-incomplete suite." I think we
>want a suite that can compete with proprietary offerings, especially
>Microsoft Office. It has to have all the features end users need, it
>has to be very stable, and it has to have a nice GUI.
We don't want to be "pretty good for free" we want to be "pretty damn good 
*and* free." It's a subtle difference but an important one.

I'm personally dedicated as an Abiword maintainer that Abiword will have 
astounding integration with the Gnome platform. Right now, I feel that the 
outside opinion of Abiword is that "Oh, you use GnomeDialogs and the gnome 
stock buttons but that's it." That's simply not true. And I'm about to 
change that opinion.

Abiword actually uses a lot of gnome's tools (and tools it requires) and 
tends to use them XP. Take libole2 for instance. Or glib. Or libxml2. Hell, 
most *Gnome-only* apps don't have libxml2 support yet. But that's too much 
behind-the-scenes for most people to notice. I plan on getting bonobo 
integration up and running in short order. A Gnome-Print backend is almost 
done. I've got a laundry list of things to do.

And any day now I'll get around to coding msword export support too :)

Dom
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