In Development: Rudimentary Printing Support

[aleksandyr]

I've seen a bit of noise recently about this.

There's no reason AbiWord shouldn't be able to print, other than the lack of CUPS/lpr/other tools of the sort.

I'm not promising print support in Opera, but I don't see why printing to networked printers would be terribly difficult (yet!)

Please post what, specifically, you would like to see for print support, and I will see what I can do.

Note that all of this will occur on the 770 for now, since I have no 800 to test with.

[Karel Jansens]

I'm actually in agony over this one: On the one hand I'd like to have printing on my NokiLLO so much that it actually hurts; on the other I'm equally pining for a (finally?) finished and polished Abiword port.

(I did have printing (of some sort) with Abiword on ITOS2005: it involved having Abiword installed on a USB stick and a computer with a printer and email access. I used it successfully on several occasions: sending my Abiword files to my own Gmail account, inserting the Abiword stick in the "host" computer and printing from there.)

My question is this: If I answer "yes", how much longer will we have to wait for a final port of Abiword?

[jayholler]

It would be nice, but I think there would be too many different apps to try and print from (abiword, maemopad, xournal, pdf reader, email, web etc), how could they be integrted?

[Texrat]

Why would they need to be integrated? Use an independent driver model, publish the specs and let other developers add support to their individual apps.

[TA-t3]

It would be nice, but I think there would be too many different apps to try and print from (abiword, maemopad, xournal, pdf reader, email, web etc), how could they be integrted?
Er, what? That's not how it works in the Unix model, which is the issue here. To get printing support from _any_ application should simply be a question of getting cups/lpr ported and installed, as has already been mentioned by another poster. The applications simply have to send a file (postscript of pdf, typically) to the printer socket (or even just exec'ing the lpr app with a temp file, for a quick hack). Seen from the application point of view this is extremely simple when compared to the way it is (or used to be, at least) in typical Windows applications. The applications that don't have ps or pdf support integrated (e.g. email, notepad stuff) would need to add that, although it's also possible to just print raw files, if your network printer supports it.

[aleksandyr]

My question is this: If I answer "yes", how much longer will we have to wait for a final port of Abiword?

Abiword 2.4.6 is currently in my scratchbox and will be packaged and released soonish. I intend to polish it up abit and make it app-installer-compatible, for one, but it's quite a bit faster than my last release. Functionality is still heavily impaired.

TA-t3 describes the approach I'm going to take --- get CUPS working, and the rest will follow.

As far as a fully hildonized Abiword? I'd rather write my own word processor. I intend to work on it a bit more, but there is a simply mind-boggling amount of work required to get it to work at all, let alone work meaningfully. Hildon differences mean significant port work every time a new feature is added, and I don't personally use Abiword, nor am I a member of the Abiword team, nor am I paid to do this (well, I made this post through the company network) so my thoughts are not likely to change.

[Karel Jansens]

Abiword 2.4.6 is currently in my scratchbox and will be packaged and released soonish. I intend to polish it up abit and make it app-installer-compatible, for one, but it's quite a bit faster than my last release. Functionality is still heavily impaired.

TA-t3 describes the approach I'm going to take --- get CUPS working, and the rest will follow.

As far as a fully hildonized Abiword? I'd rather write my own word processor. I intend to work on it a bit more, but there is a simply mind-boggling amount of work required to get it to work at all, let alone work meaningfully. Hildon differences mean significant port work every time a new feature is added, and I don't personally use Abiword, nor am I a member of the Abiword team, nor am I paid to do this (well, I made this post through the company network) so my thoughts are not likely to change.

I don't really care about hildonisation, it's mostly eye-candy anyway. I just want a decent writer's editor that works, and apparently Abiword is the closest I'll get to it on the 770.

Unless you people want me to fire up my Newtons again and write everything in Notes? I'll do it, you know. I really will... :p

[Karel Jansens]

Oh, PS: Thanks a zillion times for your work on Abiword, Aleksandyr.

[aleksandyr]

Oh, PS: Thanks a zillion times for your work on Abiword, Aleksandyr.

The only reason I'm still working on Abiword is because of messages like yours: it's nice to know I'm working on something that people use!

I'd like to draw up a list of Abiword shortcomings at some point, beyond the ones I know of:

1) It looks ugly --- this can be resolved with some hildon gui work, nothing epic.
2) It doesn't read word files --- this SHOULD be resolvable and is probably a matter of something broken or not enabled during the build process.
3) Lots of things crash when you click on them --- most of these errors seem to come from the partial hildonization --- attempting to cast a hildon window down to a GTK window doesn't work, for example, which is why print preview crashes.
4) Doesn't print --- see CUPS ;)

[klohmann]

Aleksandyr:

Since you asked (and I really do appreciate your efforts on this - a real word processor on the 770 is critical for me), my list (in order of importance to me):

1. Ability to read and write .doc files (unfortunately, the world runs on them)
2. Outline support with the thumboard
3. Spell Checking
4. Printing (and since you didn't really ask, can I print in gnumeric too. . .(!))
4. Pretty it up (e.g. launch from menu, etc.)

That's about it -- and seriously, thanks for your work on this!!! K.

[aleksandyr]

Aleksandyr:

Since you asked (and I really do appreciate your efforts on this - a real word processor on the 770 is critical for me), my list (in order of importance to me):

1. Ability to read and write .doc files (unfortunately, the world runs on them)
2. Outline support with the thumboard
3. Spell Checking
4. Printing (and since you didn't really ask, can I print in gnumeric too. . .(!))
4. Pretty it up (e.g. launch from menu, etc.)

That's about it -- and seriously, thanks for your work on this!!! K.

2. Outline support with the thumbboard? As in, being able to increment/decrement outlines with the thumbboard? AFAIK impossible without rewriting the thumbboard.
3. Spell checking doesn't work for you? Erm, maybe I suck more at packaging than I thought.
4. Gnumeric's not my project, but who knows :D
[sic] 4. Prettying it up will happen. It's just a matter of re-using things provided by the "Maemo Word Processor" release (based on an older version of AbiWord).

[Karel Jansens]

OK, since we're apparently on the "features I want in Abiword" thread:

1. I don't personally care about Word compatibility (that's that Microsoft word processor, right?). I'd much more prefer .RTF or even .ODT filters, but as long as it produces general .ABW and .TXT files I'm good.

2. For the rest... Hey, whatever! If I can type text with it, you won't hear me complain. Word count is nice, outliner would be welcome and antimatter hyperdrive is allways appreciated of course, but none of those (well, maybe with the exception of the last one) is really a showstopper for me.

[jayholler]

Sorry about my previous post everyone, my knowledge of prining in the *nix world is obviously very limited. But from what you say it is a matter of getting CUPS ported, and then putting a meu opton within the app, right?

[Karel Jansens]

Sorry about my previous post everyone, my knowledge of prining in the *nix world is obviously very limited. But from what you say it is a matter of getting CUPS ported, and then putting a meu opton within the app, right?

It doesn't even have to be a menu option; the possibility to save a file as a PostScript file is enough to make it printable in Linux.

(OK, I tell a lie: even a .TXT option is enough, but that's not really considered "printing" by our postmodern standards :D )

[aleksandyr]

I define rudimentary print support to mean a potentially arduous configuration process followed by the existence of a Print menu option that just works ;)

[klohmann]

Aleksandyr:

Thanks for giving the opportunity for input. And please don't get me wrong -- I'm very glad to have abiword in any condition. To answer your responses:

2. The thubmboard gets very confused when you attempt to enter text in an outline. It sometimes crashes the app. The bt keyboard works fine, however.

3. Spell checking is greyed out in my menu. Didn't exist in the old version either.

4. As I said, I'll take whatever I can get.

5. Anything would be appreciated.

Thanks again for your work. K.

[nebulaone]

Aleksandyr:

Printing and document creation / editing is definitely important to me. Personally I use a Pentax PocketJet on the road for invoice printing, and if we can get print ability I will pursue them to release drivers. They are good at supporting multiple platforms.

Thank you for all your work!
Scott
N800

[BruceL]

Aleksander,
CUPS and Abiword? THANK YOU!!!!!!!
You have just multiplied the value of my 770. I will be very happy with that. (My dirty secret: I tell everyone that I use the 770 as my primary machine; that I don't need a separte PC. But they don't know that I can't print.)

NOKIA!!!!!!!! Give this man an N800!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bruce

[aleksandyr]

They did, in fact, "give" me an N800 :D

At the moment, I'm working on figuring out why wvWare (the word conversion library that AbiWord relies on) refuses to convert from 1232 to UTF-8, which is why all Word documents that I've tested show up as ? marks. It seems to be a rather low level problem hitting an osso-modified library, so it's taking some real spadework to figure out...

Print support is mildly hampered by me forgetting that my printer is quite out of ink :D working on it!

As far as printing directly, at this point I can only test shared printing (via a server) solutions personally. I will look into the Pentax --- I assume you mean the PocketJet 3 described at http://pentaxtech.com/Products/PJ3PlusBT/PJ3PlusBT_features_specs.html (fyi: they mention linux drivers, which means this shouldn't be too bad ;).

[BruceL]

They did, in fact, "give" me an N800 :D

At the moment, I'm working on figuring out why wvWare (the word conversion library that AbiWord relies on) refuses to convert from 1232 to UTF-8, which is why all Word documents that I've tested show up as ? marks. It seems to be a rather low level problem hitting an osso-modified library, so it's taking some real spadework to figure out...

Print support is mildly hampered by me forgetting that my printer is quite out of ink :D working on it!



The older version of AbiWord displayed Word files as ??? until the module "more-gconv-modules" was installed. I don't know exactly what that module is or why it makes Word files display correctly, but could that be a hint for the current version? Perhaps if you just install that module it will work?

Bruce

[aleksandyr]

I would -really- like to see this package, because it precisely describes the problem I'm having. It will be shortly followed by an unhildonized Abiword 2.5.0 that is nonetheless functional and will open and read and edit word docs. Print support to follow, and lastly hildonization.

[dcarter]

add this repository
Repository: http://erinye.com/maemo
Distribution: mistral
Component: user
and take the red pill.

Then it should appear as a file with app manager.

I can confirm that although more-gconv-modules works with AbiWord 2.2.7 and allows full manipulation of word files, it does not work for the latest build of AbiWord.

One might even need to delete the latest Abiword repository in order to see this older build, the one available through erinye.com/maemo repository.

I use this build (2.2.7) with the more-gconv-modules hack daily; it ain't perfect, but works for me quite well.

Check out this thread, from danny back in October 2006:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3346&highlight=maemo+word+processor
all the details are there.....

dcarter

[Karel Jansens]

add this repository
Repository: http://erinye.com/maemo
Distribution: mistral
Component: user
and take the red pill.

Then it should appear as a file with app manager.

I can confirm that although more-gconv-modules works with AbiWord 2.2.7 and allows full manipulation of word files, it does not work for the latest build of AbiWord.

One might even need to delete the latest Abiword repository in order to see this older build, the one available through erinye.com/maemo repository.

I use this build (2.2.7) with the more-gconv-modules hack daily; it ain't perfect, but works for me quite well.

Check out this thread, from danny back in October 2006:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3346&highlight=maemo+word+processor
all the details are there.....

dcarter

I just installed Abiword on my N800 and sofar it has crashed only once. So, not too bad, then. :p

Thanks for the instructions (although I turned red pill off as soon as Abiword was installed: it scares me).

[BruceL]

Many of the bugs that have been fixed in new versions of Abiword have to do with Word and OpenOffice documents. While I am glad that the older version of Abiword exists as a stop-gap, I hope that it won't discourage Aleksandyr from continuing to port the latest version. The ability to reliably open complex Word and OpenOffice documents is part of makeing the Nxxx into a truely useful tool verses an "almost-as-good" concept device.

B

[megabyte405]

I've briefly read through this thread and I must admit I am confused. I am an AbiWord developer, and we _do_ have a hildonized AbiWord version (and a build of 2.4.6, admittedly for Mistral but which very barely works on bora). While I certainly appreciate your work, I think perhaps it would be more effective if you worked with us upstream, as there is definite interest in our community in keeping AbiWord usable on portable/embedded devices. We're small and friendly, and don't bite! Please join the developer mailing list (info at www.abisource.com ) and join forces with us! We'll gladly consider your patches! (and 2.5.x has a lot of changes that extend far beyond the Word and ODT support insinuated here, and we still like Maemo - especially now since I have an N800 and will need a nice AbiWord soon enough...)

Thanks!
Ryan
AbiWord Dev, Win32 Maintainer, and SoC Participant (AbiCollab)

(BTW - I don't think I used red pill with our packages, either...)

[aleksandyr]

Hildonization, of course, would be submitted to you guys :)

95% of what I've been doing revolves around figuring out platform issues. The iconv issue is still there, and I still throw time at it every once in awhile to try to sort it out.

Newer versions of Hildon + newer versions of AbiWord seem to not play nicely. The last "Hildonized" build I saw was against one particular AbiWord and still had a laundry list of issues/crashes/etc.

I'm glad to see that someone with actual AbiWord knowledge is working on this now :) I wish I had more to offer.

Currently still hacking away at PhoneME...

[megabyte405]

If you could document what you're doing to make builds, that would be great - I haven't actually done the Abi build on Scratchbox yet due to lack of time, soon to be resolved, but I hope I can do so soon, and some directions would be useful, especially if I can reconcile them with (and adapt) the standard/official build instructions upstream.

[BruceL]

Excellent! Megabyte, be sure to include printing support. IMHO, one of the few mistakes that the Nokia guys made was to leave printing support out because now application developers are leaving it out of the file menu. That is a problem because when someone (aleksandyr?) finally adds printing support none of the applications will support it.

[aleksandyr]

If you could document what you're doing to make builds, that would be great - I haven't actually done the Abi build on Scratchbox yet due to lack of time, soon to be resolved, but I hope I can do so soon, and some directions would be useful, especially if I can reconcile them with (and adapt) the standard/official build instructions upstream.

95% ./configure, make, make install. Rinse and repeat until all deps are satisfied :)
4% Special options to configure that seem to vary from release to release.
1% Specific versions of scratchbox having issues.

Feel free to email/pm any errors you get, but it's a very vanilla process.

[megabyte405]

Alright - I'm quite familiar with how to build it on standard pc arches, I was mainly curious about how one goes about making the debian packages. Thanks for your help!

I'm fairly certain printing support was disabled because it would have pulled in a lot of dependencies (libgnomeprint, libgnomeprintui, hicolor-icon-theme if it's not already on there, some sort of printing backend, etc). You could try filing a bug or asking the user or dev lists - I know with 2.5.x the "embedded" builds have been made more modular so it might be possible to provide an unofficial "tweaker" version of Abi with printing support, I'm not sure.

Right now I'm trying to figure out whether a rebuild will fix the crashing and problems with word import on the n800 as they're the only problems I have personally observed and so can test. I'll be keeping this forum up to date.

[aleksandyr]

Ah hah! Now I can be of assistance.

dh_make will walk you through creating the debian files. Edit debian/rules to add configure directives, and then finally type dpkg_buildpackage -rfakeroot to build the debian package. These are all executed from where the makefile is.

As far as word import, it's a problem with wv not detecting proper conversion filters from the Word charset. I'm at a loss as to how to fix it.

You need most of those libs even with printing disabled, so it's not too bad.

[megabyte405]

FYI - the bug for the word import is now upstream: http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=10961

We really do want to work with anyone on Maemo, so if you're building Abi/deps (how to get a deb of libgsf/wv/enchant?) please send your information, patches, etc to the AbiWord list, and if they're reasonable, they'll likely be integrated so that we don't have little islands of knowledge outside of Abi that may disappear...

[aleksandyr]

libgsf/wv/enchant are all built from source by the same process, at least for the releases I did.

[megabyte405]

I've sent an email to try to get the /debian directories from the person who put together the official AbiWord on Maemo packages and the dependencies. Once I have those (or a reasonable analog) I will try updating wv to the latest SVN revision, which contains a potential fix for the import problem. If that is successful, the maintainer of wv will release wv 1.2.5 with the fix, otherwise we'll work more on figuring out what it is. With luck I will be able to build a bora version of AbiWord 2.4.6 officially and get it in the repositories soon after getting the /debian files.

[debernardis]

This is only to say that I (and most probably a lot of people out there) appreciate your work and would be happy to help. If you need any kind of testing just ask. A proper wp for maemo is just too important.