Abiword gets experimental OCR scanning support

@BrendaEM: we are awaiting your patch, thanks for taking this up!

Did your comment fix the facing quotes any more than mine did? If I should not have stated my lowly opinion, why should you have?

The facing quote issue has been a pet-peeve for me because Abiword is otherwise a good word-processor, a good word-processor that I can't recommend to anyone because of one glaring oversight. Abiword is supposed to be a word processor, and not a text editor.

An antique typewriter has facing quotes, and should not Abiword have them as well? In U.S. English, we expect facing quotes for professional documents. Abiword needs facing quotes more than it needs scanner support. It needs the basics, before it needs bloat.

At one time there was a partial system in place for facing quotes, but is was broken. I filled out a bug report or two. During the last release, someone took the time to remove the rest of the code and dialog work that was already done.

Because I'm not coding Abiword, In a way, I understand your willingness to lash out at my comment, but at the same time, I would hope that Abiword would consider the comments of people who submit bugs and feature requests because QA is part of the development process.

In this case of proposing a patch, the patch that I am proposing is not for Abiword itself, but the oversight made by its infrastructure.

Still want to be offended--then by all means be offended, but you are championing a hollow cause.

You overlooked the Compose key. You're asking for "Smart Quotes," no? Or should I say “Smart Quotes?”

Applications on X11 don't need them. We have a compose key for facing quotes. And accents, additional punctuation, et cetera. It's been there for over a decade.

Also I can say personally that the time taken by Abiword developers to look over patches is very short :) Mind you, I did patch a crasher bug rather than a whimsical feature.

The same bankrupt thinking is not going to work a second time. In essence, what you seem to be implying is: QA and feedback count for nothing, users who suggest anything to make the Abiword better--should be discouraged from doing so. Your comments, comments represent the dark side open source.

I've written more than two books with OpenOffice, about 235,000 words. What a job it would be go back and re-quote every passage. Once something has been written with double-quotes, it is simple to change them single quotes, but not the other way around.

As for AbiWord: expect a 2.5.2 development release really soon now. I myself have been too busy adapting AbiWord to OLPC's needs to focus on the 'normal' AbiWord much. However, AbiWord directly benefits from 'my' OLPC work as well as the collaboration plugin is being perfected there.

As for GNOME Office: no-one ever seemed to be really interested in creating it. People have tried (including me), but never more then 1 or 2 people could be found interested to do at least a bit of work in it. This doesn't mean AbiWord and Gnumeric will stop being developed though.

What happened to the presentation software whose development started some time ago? criawips was the (strange) name, IIRC ...

Rehdon