AbiWord team interview (Red Hat Magazine)

Hi everyone,
            As one of the interviewee's I felt I should add a few comments.

ODT is a comparatively easy format to implement, compared to say RTF and especially *.doc. The
implementation we've made for AbiWord-2.6 is pretty good. It's good enough that I don't feel
bad about inflicting it on millions of kids via OLPC, where it is the default.

Nevertheless it is still a dump of the internal document model of Openwriter and as such has
some limitations. The two I mentioned in the interview are the two I'm having most trouble
implementing. Well the annotation bug is just stupid actually as it limits the usefulness of
the program. The page referenced images are an obvious limitation of OpenWriter. Just stick a
few page referenced positioned images in a document and export it to HTML and you'll see it
immediately. All the images just get shoved onto the beginning of the page, even if they
overlap. For all it's complexity RTF does not make either of these mistakes.

Now my own project, AbiWord, is far from perfect and people are quite open about pointing out
our flaws to us so I'm not being holier than thou, just pointing out issues.

Fair enough that we cop some flak for not participating in the process of defining ODF. It
basically isn't fun for us to do that kind of work. Maybe we should have roped in some people
who like to argue in committees to represent us? I didn't think of that... 

OK here is a job opening at AbiWord. Person to represent our views at ODF committee meetings.
 
Renumeration: exactly the same as the highest paid AbiWord Hacker :-)

People should not be surprised that version 1.0 of a format has issues and not be so defensive
about it. By talking about bugs openly I hope the next version of the format will be better.
If someone takes up the offer above you'll have a chance to influence things to avoid similar
bugs in the future.


Martin Sevior