Hi!
I know it's not Friday yet, but forgive me for wasting bandwidth
with something as simple as bragging.
Check out one of our competitions "milestone" chart, or "roadmap".
http://www.abisource.com/spec_abiword/
This time, we'll have a look at AbiWord. It's a fine project, and I
wish the best for them, but I just want to point out that although
plenty of open source word processing projects are going on out there,
we are still among the leaders of the pack.
The AbiWord people have four milestones. On that chart, we are right
before milestone 4. They are approaching milestone 1.
I think this is cool to know: Since LyX is the oldest project, we
are also one of the most advanced open source word processors out
there, despite some disadvantages.
Maybe somebody else could have a look some of the other offerings
these days. I think the KOffice word processor might be approaching
milestone 3, but "fortunately", their aim is different than ours:
They want to implement a desktop publishing program.
--
New projects have a lot of technological advantages: They can simply
build on better technology: Better toolkits, better programming
languages (STL in C++ for instance), Corba, etc., etc. All of these
things have appeared and matured during the lifetime of LyX.
Because of these better technologies, they have the potential
to build something faster than the speed of which LyX was built
five years ago. And they have demonstrated this. When I look
at the screenshots out there, I'm impressed by how fast they
are progressing.
But at the same time, we are also beginning to use these new technologies
by rewriting the base of the code. This rewrite is going to take some
time (it has already), and we are not there yet. But the good thing
to know is that eventhough we have to do this, the *existing* product is
still better than what others are aiming for initially. We already have
images, tables, spell checker, headers/footers, widow/orphan control,
pargraph styles, LaTeX import, versioning-control, parent/child documents
and all that. And furthermore, these things for the most part work without
flaws. (The image support is a weak spot - we know that.)
We still need a few crucial things to be really there: Customizable
character styles, and customizable paragraph styles. Multiple views
and a scripting language.
We are aiming for all of this in the rewrite, so when the rewrite is done,
other projects might have started catching up on our existing features, but
we will end up ahead again: We will feature many of the same advanced
features other projects have, and on top of that, we will still have the
superior logical interface and the best output quality.
And the most complete feature set.
So if you want to join the train, go read one of those C++ tutorials
and start hacking away. Or grab that fine framework Etienne provided
in Perl, and use it with the LyXServer to do an interactive graphical
tutorial.
Or do something else. There are plenty of room for playing and doing fun
things. Jose is aiming for DocBook. That's another example of how
advanced we are: With relative little effort, we can support a completely
different technology!
Similarly, it's relatively easy to go ahead and implement a native
HTML output mode, using style sheets. Have a look at the new code
for producing LinuxDoc - it's simple and well contained, and serves
as a great starting place for doing native HTML.
Greets,
Asger
P.S. Of course such comparisions are highly unscientific and biased
and unfair and annoying, but this is a LyX mailing list, so you will
ignore those minor details, and just feel good that you are among
the leaders, and hopefully continue to be. Especially if you take
some time out of your calendar and keep the contributions coming!
