Command-line AbiWord [LWN.net]

For those of you who thought that AbiWord was just a graphical application: AbiWord hacker Martin Sevior has posted a guide to AbiWord's server mode, which includes a command interface. Its main use appears to be scripted document format conversion, but various edition operations are possible as well.

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sight

Posted Dec 30, 2005 20:25 UTC (Fri) by dcg (subscriber, #9198) [Link] (5 responses)

Wonderful, isn't this the same than reinventing DBUS and/or DCOP? :/

Take a look at what Kword can do today thanks to dcop... no that I don't like this feature in abiword, but if it worked via DBUS it would be 2x nice ;)
http://www.terra.es/personal/diegocg/kde/dcop-example-kwo...

sight

Posted Dec 31, 2005 11:12 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (4 responses)

DCOP communicates with a running instance. So you have to have an X server running and authorize your scripts to connect to it.

abiword can be run as a pure command-line program, the good old unix way.

sight

Posted Dec 31, 2005 13:07 UTC (Sat) by danielthaler (guest, #24764) [Link] (1 responses)

Unfortuantely servermode is performed by the main abiword binary. It would be nice to have a utility that did the same without needing X libraries, gnome libraries, etc.
I have an X-less webserver I might have tried this on, otherwise.

sight

Posted Jan 1, 2006 16:30 UTC (Sun) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

What is the problem of needing the libraries as long as it doesn't need X
server when running?

(I'm not sure whether AbiWord requires X server also though.)

sight

Posted Jan 4, 2006 21:40 UTC (Wed) by dcg (subscriber, #9198) [Link] (1 responses)

DCOP/dbus can work without X - several non-graphic KDE programs use it. The fact that kwork needs X still doesn't beats my point: Why abiword just doesn't use dcop/dbus? Seems like a lot of wheel reinventing to me :/

sight

Posted Jan 5, 2006 4:23 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

A "lot" of wheel reinventing didn't likely happen. There's a big difference between a small simple protocol used by one application and what D-BUS or DCOP do. This Abiword tool needed only a teeny tiny fraction of what D-BUS is made to handle.

I wouldn't be surprised if the code to use this custom protocol is smaller than the code it would take to hook up to D-BUS. I've written a number of simple message protocols like this and they generally take only a few dozen lines of code at most.

This also means that Abiword doesn't have a direct D-BUS dependency, and keeping dependencies down seems to be something Abiword developers like to do.